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Re: Followup on eliminating symlink ReadFile calls -- it's not necessary


>  Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2001 20:49:28 -0500
>  From: "Charles S. Wilson" <cwilson@ece.gatech.edu>
>  
>  > The mailing list is not documentation. 
>  
>  Yes.  It is.  They are called "archives".

Random users have no idea what to search for in the mailing list
archives to find out that specifying "-x" to mount will cause a
performance improvement.  In fact, it won't occur to most random users
that there are *any* ways to tweak Cygwin to improve its performance.
They will assume, reasonably so, that Cygwin's performance has been
tweaked by its developers, and they just have to live with it.

I repeat my assertion that random end users should not have to consult
the mailing list to find out non-esoteric information which is
relevant to their usage of the product.  The fact that there is a
simple configuration change which can give them a double-digit
improvement in performance is certainly relevant and certainly should
NOT be esoteric.

>  The net release of cygwin is *NOT* a product.  It is a work in
>  progress.  It changes daily.  The most effective means of
>  distributing information about a rapidly changing set of tools is a
>  mailing list or newsgroup, not a relatively static set of web-based
>  documentation, and certainly not a printed/bound book.

First of all, the fact that "mount -x" will improve performance is
certainly not something that is "rapidly changing."  It has apparently
been true for a long time.

Second, Cygwin may not be a "product" right now, but it certainly
*wants* to be one, doesn't it?  Isn't there a goal here that Cygwin
will be a stable, widely used, and "commodity" software package?  Or
it going to be a cute little thing used by a smale cadre of hackers
forever?

If you are saying that you don't think Cygwin ever, at any point in
the future, needs comprehensive documentation, then I suppose there
isn't much for us to talk about, because I completely disagree.  If
you agree that Cygwin *does* eventually need such documentation, then
we should be improving the documentation along with the software, not
repeatedly saying, "Well, we don't need documentation now because the
software is unstable," over and over again, until we suddenly find
ourselves at the point where the software is stable but we still don't
have the documentation.

The fact that there is so much documentation would seem to indicate
that there are people who believe that we should have such
documentation.

>  And yes, you *should* subscribe to the mailing list if you use cygwin. 

I hope that the maintainers of Cygwin do not believe that should be
true forever.

>  This is not to say, however, that the documentation couldn't be
>  improved.  Certainly it could be better.  Many of the questions on this
>  list, however, ARE answered in the documentation that exists currently. 
>  The problem is, people don't read it.

I and my coworkers do.  If the fact that we could improve our
performance by 20% merely by using "mount -x" had been documented, we
would have learned about it long ago.

  jik

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