From:	tomas DOT fasth AT twinspot DOT net (Tomas Fasth)
Subject:	Re: Why text=binary mounts
12 Jan 1998 11:04:58 -0800 :
Message-ID:	<34B9FECB.1728870B.cygnus.gnu-win32@twinspot.net>
References:	<01BD1C69 DOT BBA294A0 DOT tiberius AT braemarinc DOT com>
Mime-Version:	1.0
To:	"gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com" <gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com>
Cc:	Fergus Henderson <fjh AT cs DOT mu DOT OZ DOT AU>,
	"Gary R. Van Sickle" <tiberius AT braemarinc DOT com>

Fergus Henderson wrote:
> That solution would be fine, if you were designing a new OS.
> But we're not!  We're trying to be compatible with an existing OS.

Yes and no. As far as I understand, one of the goals of gnuwin32 is to
minimize the burden of porting unix tools to windos. From that
perspective, gnuwin32 have to provide a unix-like way of computing for
these tools. There are a waste of unix text tools that have '\n'
hardcoded. I'm not saying this is a good thing, it's just how it is
today. Further on, I guess we don't want to unnecessarily contaminate
the stdio with a filthy text/binary i/o paradigm. Therefore, if we want
to have access to these tools on the windos platform, and have better
things to do than rewriting existing unix tools, we have to find a way
to serve these tools with under-the-cover end-of-line translations. The
question is: HOW?

text=binary/text!=binary is one possible (and existing) solution.
Another possible solution could be to map file extensions to the
appropriate mode. And I'm sure we all have our own favorite solution :)

Somewhere along the line someone has to decide what the primary task of
gnuwin32 is. It cannot possibly solve every problem that occur when
trying to merge two incompatible programming platforms. I was hoping
that one primary goal of gnuwin32 would be to compile and run unix tools
on the windos platform without modifications. That would be something,
and we're pretty close already!

We ought to be thankful to Cygnus for their honorable initiative, and to
all of you contributing to making gnuwin32 even better.

Live in peace!
-- 
Tomas Fasth                     mailto:tomas DOT fasth AT euronetics DOT com
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