Re: [HEADSUP] Base category

[Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin at cygwin dot com>]

On Dec 10 16:34, Warren Young wrote:
> On Dec 10, 2014, at 4:05 AM, Corinna Vinschen <> wrote:
> > Isn't that the same for all distros?  Cygwin has just a few thousand
> > packages, Linux distros have 10s of thousands.
> 
> I just re-did the count, and I get 4,453 for the Cygwin official repo
> (x86) plus another 6,556 in Ports.
> 
> My point, though, is that Iâm surprised Cygwin is even in this space.
> Back when I started with Cygwin, it was little more than a POSIX.1
> userland.
> [...]
> Of course I donât need to understand it.  Itâs someoneâs itch, and it
> pleases them to help Cygwin out by scratching it.

To me it's also neat as proof of concept.  I'm constantly amazed that
all this stuff really works on Cygwin.

> > Oh well.  I'm running Windows in VMs only for years and I still didn't
> > disappear from the project :}
> 
> Itâs a bit different for you, isnât it?  For you, itâs a key part of
> your employment.  For me, itâs been a means to an end, while I waited
> for the computing world to change enough that I could get off Windows.

Well, if Cygwin pointed you in the right direction, it also served its
purpose :)

> > I'm sorry to read that.  In fact I had hoped you would be willing to
> > look a bit more into the documentation again, after you so kindly pulled
> > it into the 21st century last year.  There's certainly still much room
> > for improvement.
> 
> I kind of thought Iâd been kicked off that project, after leaving the
> autodep stuff hanging. :)

I'd never have kicked you out.  Contrary to that, I was disappointed
that you apparently quickly lost interested in working on the docs.

> Point me at a problem area.  If it annoys me enough, I will be
> motivated to fix it.

Well, that's kind of the problem, isn't it?  If you don't build Cygwin,
you don't have a motivation to fix anything in the build process.

And the other side of the coin: Documentation is a necessary evil to
me.  As long as it builds I don't even realize something is missing.
But see below.

> As for your new nsswitch type docs, the first pass still needs to be
> done by you, or whoever knows whatâs going on.  But, I can still make
> a cleanup pass on it.

That would be cool.  Apart from generic cleanup, I'm really having a
problem which results in a somewhat confused layout.  The problem is,
I'm struggling with "lists".  Itemized lists, var lists, you name it.
Sometimes I'm using <screen> instead of lists just to make sure I get
what I want.

For instance, the Well-known SID connection:

  Let's discuss the SID<=>uid/gid mapping first. Here's how it works.

  Well-known SIDs in the NT_AUTHORITY domain of the S-1-5-RID type, or
  aliases of the S-1-5-32-RID type are mapped to the uid/gid value RID.
  Examples:

  <screen>
      "SYSTEM" S-1-5-18                    <=> uid/gid: 18
      "Users"  S-1-5-32-545                <=> uid/gid: 545
  </screen>
 [...etc...] 

You see what I'm trying to say, but there's certainly a better way
to get a neat layout for this, with the equivalence signs neatly
in the same columns...

And neither the layout of varlists, nor the layout of segmentedlists is
what I'm looking for.  Right now, in varlists the right column starts in
the line below the left column, rather than just on the right of the
same line, and in segmented lists the columns are cnetered to each other
if they wrap around, which also doesn't look right.

I would like to have a simple list type, which allos multiple columns,
with the columns being left-adjusted as well as vertically always start
in the same line.  Like this:

   Column1    Column2

   aaaaaaa    bbb
              ccccccc

but neither varlists nor segmentedlists seem to do it as they should.

You won't believe how much time I already spent just trying to get
the layout right... Halp?


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Maintainer                 cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat

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