Re: cygwin semantics of ..

[Eric Blake]

> Eric Blake <address@hidden> wrote:
> ...
> > For the test mentioned above, a workaround in mkdir-p.c can be written
> > that skips the optimization of an initial stat() on platforms where stat()
> > can wrongly succeed (is there any other platform out there with this bug,
> > or is it just cygwin); but it seems daunting to try and track down every
> > utility that might fail because of a .. semantics bug.
> 
> Daunting, but above all, invasive and probably counterproductive,
> assuming such a bug won't remain for long.  With Cygwin, such fundamental
> bugs make it seem that is will be relatively easy to tell users they need
> to upgrade to a newer version.

The problem is that the cygwin maintainers are arguing that
the bug WILL remain for a long time - they claim that fixing it
in cygwin is too invasive and too much of a speed penalty to
the bottleneck path conversion code already in place.  I disagree
with their attitude (standards exist for a reason, after all, even in
the corner cases), but have not yet been able to sway them to fix
the bug - it has been an ongoing battle for more than a year.

--
Eric Blake