At 03:13 PM 8/19/2004, you wrote: >On Thu, Aug 19, 2004 at 03:08:57PM -0400, Larry Hall wrote: >>At 11:51 AM 8/19/2004, you wrote: >>>On Aug 19 17:13, Gerrit P. Haase wrote: >>>>Sigh. If I were the god of Cygwin, I would have not created textmode >>>>mounts at all. I cannot see the point why it is neccessary to use it. >>> >>>Full ACK! Unfortunately the genuine gods of Cygwin have left the >>>project already long ago and they probably don't even know anymore what >>>that should have been good for. >> >>Geoffrey Noer, the Cygwin maintainer before Chris and Corinna, felt >>that full compatibility with Windows was a primary goal and POSIX/UNIX >>compatibility was a close second (at least he expressed these views at >>the time he was running the show). This may have been a common vision >>held by others who brought Cygwin mounts into existence. I don't >>remember a time when mounts weren't used in Cygwin (I doubt there was >>such a time ;-) ) but I do recall when binary mounts were not the >>default, so clearly there was a feeling that text mounts were important >>at one time in a very real way. Not that I agree with that view. ;-) >> >>BTW, I'm not bringing this up for any real important reason. It's >>largely trivia but since the topic came up, I thought I'd share my >>recollections. > >I think the decision to do things this way probably came from Steve >Chamberlain. I wonder if it was just easier to have text mode mounts >back in the era before there was an emacs or a vi available and you >needed to use notepad or wordpad for editing. > >Of course, both have been available since 1995 at least, so that's >probably not it. > >There was also at least one major Cygnus customer (Intel) who used to >adamantly demand that text mode work reliably, IIRC.
Well, that would do it. If that's not enough of a reason to boycott Intel, I don't know what is. ;-) -- Larry Hall http://www.rfk.com RFK Partners, Inc. (508) 893-9779 - RFK Office 838 Washington Street (508) 893-9889 - FAX Holliston, MA 01746 -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
