Repost, different list...File::Spec, cygwin, Syntactic vs. Semantic path analysis

[Christopher Faylor]

On Sun, Jan 05, 2003 at 11:02:02AM -0800, Gurusamy Sarathy wrote:
>As far as the Win32 native port goes (I'm not really that cygwin-savvy to
>comment on what should happen for that port) I like to see:

I'm cygwin savvy and pretty perl savvy (although it's been quite some
time since I've posted anything to perl5-porters) but I have to say the
issue of how to deal with win32 paths is pretty uninteresting to me as
far as cygwin is concerned.

I think that if someone wants to use win32 paths they shouldn't be using
cygwin.  One of the primary focuses of cygwin was to isolate the user
from the backslash and colon nonsense.  It's a shame that we don't allow
the creation of filenamess with colons and backslashes but going out of
the way to arbitrarily deal with c: just seems anti-cygwin to me.  And,
attempting to treat /cygdrive/c as special in some way and indicative of
a "volume" also is wrong.  If applicable, /cygdrive/c should be
considered a mount point and /cygdrive should be considered to be
equivalent to a "devfs" system on linux.

I sympathize with the headaches involved with trying to accomodate win32
paths and will obviously support whatever decisions are made in this
regard but I would like to suggest that, for the most part, Cygwin path
handling should be as close to UNIX as possible.  Cygwin short circuits
most of its special handling when it sees a ':' or a '\'.  There is no
mount table interpolation in such a case.  To be consistent, I think it
makes sense for any perl cygwin module to automatically punt to win32
path spec handling when it sees those with the possible caveat that "a:"
== "a:\" on cygwin.

To address another issue in this thread, we won't be modifying cygwin to
allow the use of /cygdrive/c to mean "the current directory on drive c".
That's only an "OS" feature on Windows 9x and it clearly has no place in
a UNIX-like environment.  Even if this was not the case, the fact is
that this is long-established behavior for cygwin.  Changing it now
would not be a good idea without a really really good reason.

cgf
(cygwin project lead)
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