Mail Archives: cygwin-developers/1998/08/14/05:03:53
Hi Geoff ;^)
As was pointed out to me when I mistakenly
said that // was just a kludge to allow a brain dead
drive table system to emulate a continuous
unix style FS, // is required by the posix
standard.
That doesn't mean you have to use it, but programs
that claim to be posix must allow it, and attach no
special significance to it.
Since cygwin32 has to support the syntax anyway
if it wants to claim posix compliance, I don't see much
point in trying to come up with an alternative.
Either all drives would have to be automatically mounted
at dll startup, and no programmatic access to the mount
table could be allowed, or you would have to come up
with something similar to // that really would be an
incompatible kludge.
OTOH if you want to rewrite the // support so that
it will accept both //computername/drive:/dir/file.ext
and //drive/dir/file.ext, more power to you, I don't see how
you could possibly support both, but you are the cygwin32
GOD ;^)
possibly a : in the path could force UNC?
On Thu, 13 Aug 1998 05:00:21 +0000, you wrote:
>On Mon, Aug 10, 1998 at 09:31:26AM -0400, Larry Hall wrote:
>[...]
>> This should be a FAQ (is it already?) The mount utility has much the same
>> semantics (although not the same syntax!) as UNIX variants. It does not,
>> however, have the requirement that the directory to which you are mounting
>> must exist. This is unfortunate in many ways since all the existing tools
>> assume that if there is something mounted, there will already be an entry
>> in the directory for the tools (ls, bash) to pick up on.
>[...]
>
>The fact that mount does not require the parent directory to exist is
>a bug. It really ought to.
>
>I also consider the //<drive-letter>/ system for referring to drives a
>Bad Idea (tm) since it conflicts with the UNC namespace. I'm somewhat
>thinking of removing this functionality and replacing it with
>something more sensible but this may be too painful for everyone for
>us to contemplate it seriously. :-(
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