Please help! (was: Re: One system works, the other doesn't)

Igor Pechtchanski pechtcha@cs.nyu.edu
Sat May 10 03:26:00 GMT 2003


On Sat, 10 May 2003, Peter Davis wrote:

> Peter Davis <pd@world.std.com> wrote in news:Xns936E679AF108Fpdworldstdcom@80.91.224.249:
>
> > I have two systems running Cygwin: an NT4 (home) machine and a XP
> > (work) machine.  I've tried to make them as similar as possible, but
> > there are apparently some differences that elude me.  Specifically:
> >
> > 1) At home (NT4), .bashrc is automatically run when I fire up a bash
> >    shell.  At work, it doesn't, though I can manually run it with
> >    source ~/.bashrc
> >
> > 2) At home (NT4), the simple perl script I use to filter mutt messages
> >    before displaying them works beautifully.  At work (XP), the
> >    messages all display with ^M at the end of every line.  (This is
> >    recent ... since I just re-installed Cygwin on this machine.  It
> >    *used* to work.)
> >
> > 3) At home, mutt has no trouble telling me which MH mailboxes contain
> >    new mail.  At work, however, this function of mutt doesn't work.
> >    Once I open the mailbox, the new messages are correctly marked with
> >    'N', but when I attempt to change mailboxes, mutt doesn't prompt me
> >    as it should.
> >
> > I've compared the output from 'cygcheck -s -v' on the two machines,
> > but I didn't see anything obvious.  (The work machine has more
> > packages installed.)  Can anyone suggest what might be responsible for
> > these quirks?
> >
> > Currently, the NT4 (home) machine is working *better* than the XP
> > (work) one.  Since I'll be upgrading the home machine to a new box
> > running XP shortly, I'd like to find out what's going on.
>
> I've had two people ask to see the output of `cygcheck -svr` on both
> machines, which I dutifully posted to this list.  No response.
>
> This problem has now gotten more urgent because I'm trying to move the home
> setup onto a new XP system.  Same results: everything which works on my NT4
> setup does *not* work on the new XP setup.  I would really love to know
> what the key Cygwin setup issues are, so I can fix this.  Please help!
>
> One difference seems to be with Perl.  When I write to stdout from Perl, it
> uses DOS/Windows line endings (^M^J) instead of Unix ones.  So all the
> nifty Perl scripts that I call from mutt, such as the display_filter, don't
> work.  I did choose Unix text files when I installed Cygwin, and everything
> is mounted in binmode.  As far as I can tell, other applications are
> working correctly, but Perl isn't.  If I disable the mutt display_filter,
> mutt displays messages just fine.  With the (Perl) filter enabled, though,
> I get ^M at the end of every line.
>
> Also, for some reason mutt can't detect which mailboxes have new messages
> on this system, but it can on the old NT4 system.  Any clues about that?
>
> Another thing:  For some reason, mutt can't find some of the Perl scripts
> I've been using, even though I can see them and cat them from the shell
> prompt.
>
> Can anyone give me a clue what's happening here?  I'm tearing my hair out.
>
> Thank you.
> -pd

Peter,

This still doesn't belong on cygwin-apps. ;-)

Now for your real troubles.  Did you compare the two cygcheck outputs
yourself at all?  In short, apart from answering "what's different on your
two machines?", your two cygcheck outputs lead to asking "what's *not*
different?".

- You have *completely* different versions of Cygwin and most of the
  packages at work and at home.

- You have different environment settings, in particular PATH, on the two
  machines.

- You have *four* cygwin*.dll's at home (NT machine):
  * the 1.3.20 cygwin1.dll in f:\cygwin\bin;
  * a cygwin.dll from 1996 in d:\bin;
  * and both a cygwin1.dll and a cygwinb19.dll in d:\4TEX5.0\BIN\WIN32.

Aside from that,

1) probably arises from you having a later version of base_files on your
   work machine.  You very likely had either .bash_profile linked to
   .bashrc on your home machine, or had a custom .bash_profile that called
   .bashrc.  Either that, or you don't pass a --login flag to bash at
   home.

2) most likely is the same problem that other people were having with
   PERLIO in perl 5.8.0 (your home machine has 5.6.1).  Try setting
   PERLIO=perlio in the environment (see
   <http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2003-03/msg01093.html>).

3) I have no idea about.  Since you have the same version of mutt on
   both machines, I'd guess it's a permission problem.
   Are your mailboxes on a local drive, or a network one?  What's the
   output of "ls -l" and "ls -ln" on all of your mailboxes on both
   machines?  Are your /etc/passwd and /etc/group up to date on both
   machines?  You have a capitalized "P" in the username on your work
   machine, and the UID is >10000, which means you're a domain user.  Did
   you ever wonder what group name "mkgroup_l_d" means?  Looks like your
   Cygwin is on NTFS in both cases, though, so that's not an issue.

By looking into the above you're likely to fix most of your problems.
If this doesn't work, your suggested course of action is the following:

- Back up your home directory on your work machine (mv /home /home-old).
- Transfer over your home directory from home (tar -cjf
  /cygdrive/c/my_home.tar.bz2 /home) to your work machine (tar -xjf
  /cygdrive/c/my_home.tar.bz2).
- Also transfer the local setup cache (f:\cygwin\downloads) to your work
  machine (you can simply copy it to c:\cygwin\packages there).
- Run setup.exe, select "Install from Local Directory", then choose all
  the needed packages.  This will downgrade most of the packages on your
  work machine, and bring it in sync with your home machine.
- Try out your programs, make sure they work.
- Then (and only then) upgrade packages one by one from the net to see
  which one breaks things; if it does, downgrade it or ask how to fix
  things on this list - it'll be easier to help with one package
  misbehaving all other things being equal.

This way you first get an installation on your work machine working the
way you want it, and then you can make it the latest and greatest.

Hope this helps,
	Igor
-- 
				http://cs.nyu.edu/~pechtcha/
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     |,4-  ) )-,_. ,\ (  `'-'		Igor Pechtchanski
    '---''(_/--'  `-'\_) fL	a.k.a JaguaR-R-R-r-r-r-.-.-.  Meow!

Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.
  -- Leto II


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