Jim Meyering <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Are there `real' environments that use a set-up like you describe, > with a writable file system mounted inside a read-only one?
I vaguely recall doing this myself a while back, on a Solaris box. I made /usr read-only, but /usr/tmp was a writeable filesystem under /usr. I expect that others might do this sort of thing too -- with NFS mounts on diskless systems, say. > If mkdir-p.c were to handle Cygwin's EROFS like ENOSYS, we'd have to add > code to distinguish a legitimate EROFS (because a missing destination > directory cannot be created) from a cygwin-style should-be-EEXIST one. I looked into the POSIX spec for mkdir(2), and it allows mkdir to return whatever error code it likes when more than one error code applies. So, for example, if /usr is not writeable and /usr/bin exists, then mkdir("/usr/bin", 0) is allowed to fail with errno==EACCES. My interpretation is that Cygwin is within its POSIX rights to fail with errno==EROFS here. Admittedly this is a bit weird, but it's not that hard to make the coreutils code accommodate the POSIX-allowed behavior for mkdir(2), and no extra system calls are needed in the usual case (as per my proposed patch in <http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2005-10/msg00149.html>). Christopher Faylor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I'm just wondering if there is some kind of official coreutils policy > here. Not for coreutils itself, no. However, the GNU coding standards make it clear that porting to systems like Cygwin is lower priority for the GNU project than porting to GNU/Linux. See <http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/System-Portability.html>. That being said, I think the patch mentioned above should do the trick. -- 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/