Re: Mount table in registry

[Randall R Schulz <rschulz at sonic dot net>]

Igor, Corinna,

At 08:12 2003-05-22, Igor Pechtchanski wrote:
> On Thu, 22 May 2003, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>
> > On Thu, May 22, 2003 at 04:12:37PM +0200, Sebastian Miele wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > the user documentation on the mount table
> > > (http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using.html#MOUNT-TABLE) says that the
> > > mount table is located under:
> > >
> > >   HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Red Hat, Inc./Cygwin/mounts v<version>
> > >
> > > However, on my system it is located under:
> > >
> > >   HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Cygnus Solutions/Cygwin/mounts v2
> > >
> > > Most probably the documentation has not been updated, yet.
> > >
> > > How likely is it that either the version (2) or the company (Red Hat,
> > > Inc./Cygnus Solutions) changes in the future?
> >
> > 100%
> >
> > Use mount.  Never rely on the registry.
> > Corinna
>
> Corinna and others,
>
> This is becoming an FAQ, so I'm going to feel the waters here...  Would
> making a libmount.a (or, better yet, cygmount.dll) be a good idea?  Then
> programs can link against it and be guaranteed that they can read mounts
> or verify mount locations.  I know Cygwin exports getmntent() and the
> like, but the above would be something that doesn't depend on cygwin1.dll.
> Setup.exe could then use it as well (although then it'd have to be a
> static lib).  Comments, flames?


Tsk, tsk. Never _ask_ for flames!


Anyway, I have two points:

1) I believe this is probably a good idea.

2) I think that questions about and interest in the current mount table 
implementation details (registry entries, at the moment) are not 
inappropriate. Sometimes knowing these details is important for 
diagnostic and repair purposes. After all, registry corruption is not 
unheard-of under Windows, is it? Sometimes manual correction could be 
required, at least in principal.


I agree people should not be encouraged, explicitly or implicitly, to 
fiddle with the Windows registry, but many Cygwin users are 
knowledgeable enough to do so without undue probability of committing a 
gross error. In those rare cases where manual intervention in the 
Cygwin portion of the registry _is_ called for, good information on how 
it's used is important.

By the way, isn't direct access to the registry the only way to modify 
or set the heap-chunk-in-megabytes entry?

Randall Schulz


>     Igor
> --
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