Re: Side-by-side configuration is incorrect reported as permission denied

[Andrew DeFaria <Andrew@DeFaria.com>]

On 08/12/2012 01:35 PM, Earnie Boyd wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 12, 2012 at 1:56 PM, Pawel Jasinski wrote:
>>> If you can find a nice Linux errno which maps from ERROR_SXS_CANT_GEN_ACTCTX
>>> to something other than EACCES I'd be happy to change Cygwin.
>> Sorry I was not clear. The point was not to use linux error code. what
>> I was trying to say is linux does not follow POSIX only error codes
>> policy.
>> Such a policy is impractical. Your point was POSIX only, wasn't it?
>> You can add cygwin specific error codes.
Although I believe I understand some of the issues of POSIX or 
POSIX-like compliance in reporting errnos, etc. I still wish to address 
the following.
> Cygwin doesn't have the access required to execute the process because
> of some reason.
Exactly.
> It is up to you to examine the reason.
Yes and no, IMHO. You (meaning Cygwin) have immensely more information 
about what's going on than I (the user) do! You are the best person in 
the whole world at this time to report what went wrong so that I can fix 
the problem and return to profitability. And you're gonna hoard that info???
> Why should we be bothered with anything other than EACCESS?
Like I said, because you have much more information about what's going 
on, specifically what you were doing and where in the series of calls 
and instructions that lead you to an error. True some other sub-system 
may have errored out and perhaps didn't even give you much to go on, but 
in general you'd have more information about what went wrong than the user.
> When you reported the issue the first action you took was to determine why you couldn't
> execute a Windows program. That was the correct action,
As the actual person who reported the issue I can assure you that my 
first action was most definitely not to determine why I couldn't execute 
a Windows program. The reason seemed clear - or at least was clearly 
reported to me although the reason was actually erroneous. I truly 
thought it was a permission problem. I checked the permission bits and 
wondered what was going on because according to Cygwin I *HAD* 
permissions to execute the file. I thought perhaps it was on a share or 
maybe the Windows permissions matrix was weirdly configured, etc. When 
none of that panned out I got the bright idea to try it in cmd, which 
gave me the better error message. Then I scratched my head and wondered 
by Cygwin didn't simply report that error message (that I assume 
CreateProcess passed back to it - however I don't write Windows code) 
and simply and dutifully report back the text of the error message the 
OS gave it. Many other users would not have thought to try that.

Now I know that there are POSIX error codes and people tend to check 
error numbers and you want to put the closest match of a POSIX errno to 
the Windows error message. But why couldn't you just print to stderr the 
error message that Windows returned perhaps in addition to setting 
syserr to "Permission denied"?
> hammering this list with your wishes isn't gaining you sympathy from those that
> use and support it.
I don't know. He has my sympathy. My pity too... :-)
-- 
Andrew DeFaria <http://defaria.com>
The other day I was playing poker with Tarot cards. I got a full house 
and four people died.


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