Joachim Achtzehnter wrote:
Hi Corinna,
You wrote:
I've updated the version of sed to 4.1.5-2.
It reverts the default behaviour of sed back to treating CR/LF as
lineendings, in contrast to 4.1.5-1, which only treated the trailing LF
as lineending and the preceeding CR as the last character on the line.
Thank you very much for this fix. It will make life easier for all of us
who struggle with a mix of native and Cygwin tools. It is very much
appreciated that as far as line endings are concerned the attitude taken
by Cygwin developers is not "use POSIX line endings".
At the risk of provoking another salvo of emotional responses I'd like
to express the hope that those who take the opposite attitude with
respect to path names ("use POSIX paths") may reconsider their position.
I would venture to suggest that a large proportion of serious users of
Cygwin must deal with mixed native/Cygwin tools/programs at lest to some
extent. Trying to accommodate native standards for things like line
endings and path names will obviously make things easier for everybody
except those who use Cygwin as a pure POSIX environment that they never
leave. Think about it this way: If you say "use POSIX paths or find
something other than Cygwin to do the job" you might as well go one step
further: run a POSIX operating system. In other words, you're one the
way to undermining the rationale for Cygwin's existence.
Nobody expects that toleration of native standards which conflict with
POSIX in important ways will ever be perfect, it can't be. But this is
no reason to tear out what's already there.
Of course, when there are projects that depend on these tools to deliver
POSIX/UNIX semantics as well as those that rely on them for Windows-like
behavior, there's the inevitable group of people that will be inconvenienced
no matter what. As you say, it's a compromise that will never be perfect
because of these conflicting needs. But now we're getting dangerously
close to philosophy, which is admittedly not Cygwin-specific. I'd recommend
that if others want to continue a discussion along the philosophical lines,
take it to the cygwin-talk list, so no one can flame you. ;-)
--
Larry Hall http://www.rfk.com
RFK Partners, Inc. (508) 893-9779 - RFK Office
216 Dalton Rd. (508) 893-9889 - FAX
Holliston, MA 01746
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