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Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT] Updated: sed-4.1.5-2


Joachim Achtzehnter wrote:
Hi Corinna,

You wrote:

I've updated the version of sed to 4.1.5-2.

It reverts the default behaviour of sed back to treating CR/LF as
lineendings, in contrast to 4.1.5-1, which only treated the trailing LF
as lineending and the preceeding CR as the last character on the line.

Thank you very much for this fix. It will make life easier for all of us who struggle with a mix of native and Cygwin tools. It is very much appreciated that as far as line endings are concerned the attitude taken by Cygwin developers is not "use POSIX line endings".


At the risk of provoking another salvo of emotional responses I'd like to express the hope that those who take the opposite attitude with respect to path names ("use POSIX paths") may reconsider their position. I would venture to suggest that a large proportion of serious users of Cygwin must deal with mixed native/Cygwin tools/programs at lest to some extent. Trying to accommodate native standards for things like line endings and path names will obviously make things easier for everybody except those who use Cygwin as a pure POSIX environment that they never leave. Think about it this way: If you say "use POSIX paths or find something other than Cygwin to do the job" you might as well go one step further: run a POSIX operating system. In other words, you're one the way to undermining the rationale for Cygwin's existence.

Nobody expects that toleration of native standards which conflict with POSIX in important ways will ever be perfect, it can't be. But this is no reason to tear out what's already there.

Of course, when there are projects that depend on these tools to deliver POSIX/UNIX semantics as well as those that rely on them for Windows-like behavior, there's the inevitable group of people that will be inconvenienced no matter what. As you say, it's a compromise that will never be perfect because of these conflicting needs. But now we're getting dangerously close to philosophy, which is admittedly not Cygwin-specific. I'd recommend that if others want to continue a discussion along the philosophical lines, take it to the cygwin-talk list, so no one can flame you. ;-)

--
Larry Hall                              http://www.rfk.com
RFK Partners, Inc.                      (508) 893-9779 - RFK Office
216 Dalton Rd.                          (508) 893-9889 - FAX
Holliston, MA 01746

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