two problems with cygwin's zip

[Christopher Faylor]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2001 at 12:03:56PM -0400, Fred T. Hamster wrote:
>the first problem (of seeing absolute paths in zips) occurs when using
>forward slashes as well.  it's an absolute path issue rather than a
>slash-handedness issue.  thus, this is still a bug relevant to cygwin's
>zip, even if we must discount slash issues in paths.  but i don't
>suggest that we abandon those issues...

I don't see this.  If I type:

zip /tmp/foo /bin/ls

"bin/ls" is added to the archive.  I actually tried this before I
responded.

>it seems pretty disturbing to me that a unix emulation environment
>running under ms-windows would have many problems parsing ms-dos paths.
>i realize the intrinsic difficulties with the backslash as an escape
>character, but i also am aware that many of the tools i use at the
>office are really psyched about generating the backslash as the path
>separator.  if the cygwin tools are unable to handle those generated
>paths, then that signficantly detracts from my ability to work with
>cygwin on the ms-windows platforms.

Again, I think that you've missed the point of the cygwin environment.
Red Hat has almost zero interest in modifying UNIX tools to deal with
the MS-DOS path syntax.  That was one of the main points in developing
cygwin.

I assume that package maintainers also have very little interest.

So, while this may be vitally important to you, it is pretty much a
non-goal for the project in general.  That doesn't mean that we won't
accept patches to make things work better with MS-DOS syntax but it
probably does mean that no package maintainer is going to be interested
in doing the work themselves.

>in most paths it's fairly obvious which interpretation is intended.
>backslashes after colons should probably always be considered
>separators for the rest of the path.

Of course there are well-know rules for interpreting MS-DOS paths.  The
path translation code in the cygwin DLL understands them in most cases.
That doesn't mean that each of the 80+ packages in the Cygwin release
understands them.  If the code in zip, or cp, or vim assumes that paths
contain '/' and know nothing about the "specialness" of a colon or a
backslash, then there isn't anything that the Cygwin DLL can do.  That
application would have to be specially ported to understand MS-DOS
syntax.

>i was under the impression that the path processing was central to the
>cygwin dll, perhaps in the glob() function.

Cygwin's glob function comes straight from UNIX.  I don't know if zip
uses it.  I doubt that it has any bearing on the matter of stripping
absolute paths.  glob doesn't do that.  That is something that a program
like zip would do for itself.

>its own file globbing, so it seems that some additional code in the main 
>glob() function for these issues that are peculiar to ms platforms would 
>go pretty far in allowing cygwin to speak both flavors of slash.  these 
>impressions are garnered from general unix experience rather than 
>specific knowledge of the cygwin implementation though.

If you are really that interested in this, then you should definitely
look at the source and educate yourself in what is going on.  Perhaps,
I'm wrong.  Maybe zip is somehow using glob or some other function in
some way that would be easily solved by modifying the cygwin DLL.  For
me, this is working as designed, so I'm not going to be trying to "fix"
this and I sincerely doubt that the maintainer will be interested
either.

Sorry.

cgf

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