Testers needed: New passwd/group handling in Cygwin

[Andrey Repin]

Greetings, Steven Penny!

>> For as long as Cygwin has existed, it has stored user and group
>> information in /etc/passwd and /etc/group files.  Under the assumption
>> that these files would never be too large, the first process in a
>> process tree, as well as every execing process within the tree would
>> parse them into structures in memory.  Thus every Cygwin process would
>> contain an expanded copy of the full information from /etc/passwd and
>> /etc/group.

> Stellar writeup! I read the whole post. I am happy to help, but I have couple of
> questions

> - How will this affect "normal" users, that is to say one admin user on one
>   computer with no domain or networking? Will it be better to use this new
>   system or keep /etc/passwd?

Largely doesn't matter. Would probably simplify new installs once this change
is tested and deemed stable enough to be the default way of going with it.

> - Do you have any benchmarks available? Or instructions on how we could test the
>   speed of the new system?

In the end of the day, this should affect program startup times. But in home
environment, the difference will be negligible.
The main point of testing is consistency and general usability of a new
feature, as I see it.


--
WBR,
Andrey Repin (anrdaemon@yandex.ru) 13.02.2014, <20:03>

Sorry for my terrible english...


--
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple