Re: [HEADSUP] Let's start a Cygwin 1.7 release area

[Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin@cygwin.com>]

On Apr  4 14:22, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> On Apr  3 17:46, Charles Wilson wrote:
> > Christopher Faylor wrote:
> >> Why do we need a fstab.$SID and linux doesn't need this?
> >
> > Well, I like to create user mounts for each user (Guest, Administrator, me) 
> > like this:
> >
> > mount -f -u -b "C:/Documents and Settings/<user>/My Documents" "/mydocs"
> > mount -f -u -b "C:/Documents and Settings/<user>/Desktop" "/desktop"
> > [...]
> 
> I understand that.  Well, we shouldn't make this overly public, but
> keeping the fstab.$SID handling in doesn't hurt the least bit.
> [...]

I just applied a patch which changes the fstab handling somewhat.  I
made especially a change to how system and user mount points are
handled, which is supposed to support sysadmins in commercial or
organizational environments.

- The paths in the first and second field may contain nuts^Wspaces.
  You specify them the same way as in a Linux fstab, using the special
  string "\040":

    C:/Documents\040and\040Settings /my\040docs ntfs binary 0 0

- mount(1) and umount(1) don't write back any information to the
  registry.  Cygwin still reads mount points from the registry, though,
  if no fstab file exists.  This is just left in for the transformation
  process.  It will get removed at one point.

- All mount points in /etc/fstab are system mount points by default,
  all other mount points are always user mount points.  The important
  thing here is, that user mount points can't override system mount
  points anymore.  If you try that, you get an EPERM error.  The reason
  for this change is to allow sysadmins to specify paths in /etc/fstab
  which no user is allowed to screw up.  Paths which the user may
  umount or re-mount can be marked as user mounts by the admin.

- The flags string in the fstab file also understands the flags "system"
  and "user" now, to allow the sysadmin to specify default paths which a
  user may change.

- Cygwin creates "/cygdrive" as default cygdrive prefix now before
  reading the fstab files.  It's a user mount by default, so the user
  can override it.  If the sysadmin decides to add the cygdrive prefix
  to /etc/fstab as system mount, no user can override it, but gets an
  EPERM instead.

- The user-specific fstab file is now /etc/fstab.$USER, not /etc/fstab.$SID
  anymore.  My significant other convinced me that nobody(TM) knows what
  a SID is.  I pointed out the Cygwin user's guide, but...

- I hacked a new Cygwin postinstall script, which is called "postinstall"
  in the Cygwin sources, and which gets copied to
  /etc/postinstall/000-cygwin-post-install.sh at installation time.
  It creates a default /etc/fstab file which (for now) contains the
  standard mount points for /usr/bin and /usr/lib.  The script also
  creates the /dev/shm and /dev/mqueue subdirectories which are required
  for POSIX semaphores/shared memory/message queues, but that's another
  story.

  The /etc/fstab file which gets created by this script contains
  lots of comment, which is basically taken from Linux' fstab man page.
  I added Cygwin specifc descriptions and examples.  I hope it helps.
  I would be glad if people could read the text and comment on it.


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Project Co-Leader          cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat