On 13/09/2020 16:02, Brian Inglis wrote:
> On 2020-09-13 01:39, Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty via Cygwin-apps wrote:
>> On 13/09/2020 07:13, Achim Gratz wrote:
>>> Hamish McIntyre-Bhatty via Cygwin-apps writes:
>>>> Hmm, who decides (and how) what counts as a Linux distro?
>>> Something that is capable of and has actually done a license review.
>> Seems fair.
>>>> Either way, could anyone provide some insight as to whether bundling the
>>>> Cygwin DLL would allow Cygwin programs to access the virtual /dev and
>>>> /cygdrive paths? I have this all ready to be released for Windows, so
>>>> one way or another I'll need to make a bundle anyway for convenience.
>>> Yes, all the virtual fs are provided through the Cygwin DLL.
>> Excellent, thank you :)
>>>> It'd be great if it could make it into the official repos but I first
>>>> submitted this ITP around a month ago so I don't have high hopes as of
>>>> this point.
>>> You still haven't explained what it would be useful for.  This
>>> bare-metal stuff isn't something I'd usually consider doing from within
>>> a userland compatibility layer running on Windows.
>> My apologies - I thought I had but that must be a false memory. This
>> module is a device information collector, and in Cygwin's case it makes
>> it easy for users of DDRescue-GUI to find the link between the Windows
>> drive letters and Cygwin paths. It also provides other information such
>> as make and model, but this is limited on Cygwin because some of the
>> more low-level device management utilities don't exist, probably due to
>> bits of missing API as explained to me by Corrina (at least I think it
>> was her). It behaves very similarly on macOS and Linux, except it just
>> needs to inform the user of device details instead of also relating to
>> drive letters/Windows names.
>>
>> This is basically just a dependency for DDRescue-GUI (a GUI I wrote for
>> GNU ddrescue), and I had interest on getting this running easily on
>> Windows, so I thought Cygwin would be the way to go for better
>> compatibility. You can find DDRescue-GUI here:
>> https://www.hamishmb.com/html/downloads.php?program_name=ddrescue-gui
>> and the user guide is available from the nav bar if you want more
>> information about it.
>>
>> Does that answer your question - hopefully I didn't miss the point.
> Package smartmontools has access to some low level disk I/O features when run
> elevated under an admin account.

Yes, I think you (or maybe Corinna) told me this before - getdevinfo
compiles this together with other information to try and get as complete
a picture as possible. That was a useful tip for sure.

Hamish