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Coreutils for Windows

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Re: Coreutils for Windows

#191

Post by phs318u »

larkost wrote: post #146
pjmlp wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a great developer experience out of the box!

I was going to comment that any sort of script that you are using in multiple environments probably should have all of the paths completely written out. I usually try to do this myself as I have gotten burned by binaries from unexpected paths on new systems a number of times. But then I realized that the point of this project is to make it easy to write scripts that can be used on multiple OSs... and that is going to…

Sounds like a case for GNU Autoconf and ./configure.

Re: Coreutils for Windows

#192

Post by CamperBob2 »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #168
justsomehnguy wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Windows ecosystem handles it fine (by using a single standard). Linux doesn't. That's its problem. It's always funny to see how the fanbois treat their way as the one and only 'True Way'.

I didn't say it was the one and only True Way. My intended meaning - which I admit I may have poorly conveyed - is that tools from the unix ecosystem are intended to work on unix conventions, and do, and that works. Windows has different standards, which is also fine, but it follows that you shouldn't expect unix tools to follow Windows standards even if you make them run on Windows. This is like getting Windows soft…

I think the point is that line endings are a really, really stupid hill for either Linux or Windows to die on. The day when any programs should have cared about line endings came and went decades ago.

Re: Coreutils for Windows

#193

Post by avidphantasm »

noselasd wrote: post #76
avidphantasm wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they need to ditch drive letters first. The NT kernel and NTFS don't even require them (I used to mount disks without drive letters back in the NT 4 era). They just don't care enough to get rid of this annoyance.

users , especially non-technical, find it highly useful in my experience. Is it a net positive to get rid of them, or will it largely only make developers happier ?

It’s arcane and technical for no reason. /Users/ME/Documents, /Media/MyThumbDrive/…, etc. are much clearer and less confusing than C:\…

Re: Coreutils for Windows

#194

Post by avidphantasm »

Dwedit wrote: post #95
avidphantasm wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they need to ditch drive letters first. The NT kernel and NTFS don't even require them (I used to mount disks without drive letters back in the NT 4 era). They just don't care enough to get rid of this annoyance.

Nobody wants to use \??\GLOBALROOT\Device\HarddiskVolume3\ in their paths.

Nonsense. You can mount filesystems to mount points in much the same way as is done in Unix. No one would ever need to do that.

Re: Coreutils for Windows

#195

Post by 0x1d7 »

okanat wrote: post #180
0x1d7 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NT kernel could never implement full POSIX semantics. It would have to be another UN*X clone to do so. And that would suck.

NT kernel can and did implement POSIX. Multiple times even. That's how WSL1 works. NTFS can also support Unix-like permissions. There are ACLs for Owner and Group. However, I'm not keen on using yet another Unix clone as well. At least Windows NT brought the world into 90s in the OS state-of-the-art where Unix clones are stuck in 80s and each of them patch around the deficiencies of POSIX. Native asynchronous APIs an…

POSIX was implemented as a subsystem.

And it was never _fully_ implemented, as my post said. The NT kernel doesn't support certain POSIX semantics (fork).

Re: Coreutils for Windows

#196

Post by okanat »

0x1d7 wrote: post #195
okanat wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NT kernel can and did implement POSIX. Multiple times even. That's how WSL1 works. NTFS can also support Unix-like permissions. There are ACLs for Owner and Group. However, I'm not keen on using yet another Unix clone as well. At least Windows NT brought the world into 90s in the OS state-of-the-art where Unix clones are stuck in 80s and each of them patch around the deficiencies of POSIX. Native asynchronous APIs an…

POSIX was implemented as a subsystem. And it was never _fully_ implemented, as my post said. The NT kernel doesn't support certain POSIX semantics (fork).

WSL1 DOES implement fork() for WSL1 lightweight processes in the lxcore.sys driver: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/archive/blogs/wsl/windows-...

Re: Coreutils for Windows

#197

Post by okanat »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #185
okanat wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux kernel's ABI/API surface is completely byte-based and is tiny compared to Win32 API. The stable ABI of Windows is strictly in the user space and it covers the entire useful operating system. Don't forget that glibc isn't that ABI stable nor anything that goes all the way up to systemd/X11/gettext/Wayland/cairo/GTK/Qt/glade/Pipewire/xdg. Nothing equivalent in Linux environment is stable, especially compared agai…

See, I was sympathetic to that view, except that they specifically posted > We don't want the NT kernel to end up like Linux, after all (Emphasis mine) And that's... The one part of the OS where Linux is ABI stable.

I think they didn't mean Linux as in the kernel sense but in the overall "Family of OSes and ecosystem with very unstable APIs" sense.

Re: Coreutils for Windows

#198

Post by Dwedit »

avidphantasm wrote: post #194
Dwedit wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody wants to use \??\GLOBALROOT\Device\HarddiskVolume3\ in their paths.

Nonsense. You can mount filesystems to mount points in much the same way as is done in Unix. No one would ever need to do that.

You can indeed use mount points like C:\mountdir, but that's still on the C drive, which is a drive letter. It's not "no drive letters".
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