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From: Chris Faylor <cgf AT cygnus DOT com>
Date: Sat, 27 May 2000 21:59:18 -0400
To: "'cygwin-developers AT sourceware DOT cygnus DOT com'" <cygwin-developers AT sourceware DOT cygnus DOT com>
Subject: Re: Possible path processing change
Message-ID: <20000527215918.A28396@cygnus.com>
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References: <200005262251 DOT PAA14952 AT cygnus DOT com>
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In-Reply-To: <200005262251.PAA14952@cygnus.com>; from rdparker@butlermfg.com on Fri, May 26, 2000 at 05:47:19PM -0500

On Fri, May 26, 2000 at 05:47:19PM -0500, Parker, Ron wrote:
>This originally started as an idea for fixing some of the differences
>between how UNIX and cygwin handle paths.
>
>Currently cygwin recognizes both /cygdrive/<drive-letter> and
>//<drive-letter> as paths for unmounted drives.  Additionally it recognizes
>//server/share as a UNC path.  This leads to two problems.  The first is
>that //<drive-letter>/directory can be ambiguous.  The second is that
>scripts and programs which build paths beginning with two slashes do not
>resolve to absolute paths under cygwin as they do in UNIX.
>
>This lead to a few ideas:
>* Remove support for //<drive-letter>
>* Replace //server/share with server:share
>* Replace //*path with /path
>
>This would get rid of the ambiguity of double-slashed paths and allow cygwin
>to handle sloppy programs that try to access //path, ///path and similar
>things.
>
>Chris has already requested the //server/share stay in place because of a
>number of scripts that he has.  Prior to his request I thought these changes
>might speed up path conversion.  Now I am not sure.
>
>Would any of these things be worth doing?
>
>If there is no //server/share should we try parsing it as /directory/...?

I posted my thoughts on this in the cygwin mailing list but I didn't
discuss parsing //something/share as /something.  I think that this may
be a good idea but I wonder if we should issue a warning.  I normally
don't like having cygwin be wordy but in this case the performance hit
is so noticeable that people would want to clear this up if necessary.

A flip side of this might be to check for the directory first rather than
second.  I'm not sure how I feel about this one though.

cgf