Documenting Cygwin on NFS, no longer only exchange-medium! Re: How to fix |mkfifo()| failure if |pathname| is on NFS ? / was: Re: [EXTERNAL] Re: mkfifo: cannot set permissions of 'x.fifo': Not a directory

[Corinna Vinschen]

On Aug 28 07:35, Cedric Blancher via Cygwin wrote:
> On Sun, 27 Aug 2023 at 14:35, Corinna Vinschen via Cygwin
> <cygwin@cygwin.com> wrote:
> > As for FIFOs on NFS, as I wrote, they never worked as desired on NFS.
> > For kicks I tried back until Cygwin 3.3.  Given this isn't a regression,
> > it won't be fixed for Cygwin 3.4.
> 
> I am pretty sure this is a regression, as blast, staden and other
> software were built and operated on Cygwin.

The fact that some software works doesn't mean they use a certain
feature.  What, for instance, if they just created their FIFOs on a
local tmp dir?

I actually *tested* it on

- Cygwin 3.3.1-1 from 2021-10-28
- Cygwin 3.2.0-1 from 2021-03-29
- Cygwin 3.1.1-1 from 2019-12-18
- Cygwin 3.0.7-1 from 2019-04-30
- Cygwin 2.9.0-3 from 2017-09-12

FIFOs on NFS didn't work in all cases.

We can go back in time prior to 2017 if you like, but Cygwin FIFOs were
always just created as symlinks, and NFS symlinks were never tested for
being a device, so they never have been treated as FIFOs.  Also, NFS
FIFOs have never been recognized by the file handling code as Cygwin
FIFOs, they were just shown as such in stat(2).


Corinna