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Re: [leafnode-list] need help with cygwin port



"Gerrit P. Haase" <gerrit.haase@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> Now I start fetchnews again and it contacts the server to 
> fetch the message ID's, it sorts out what is too old.
> Now it tries to store the messages at disk, but it fails.

leafnode *HEAVILY* relies on several POSIX file system semantics that do
not map onto Windows semantics. The most important that come to my mind
right now are:

- hard links

- atomicity of link(2)

- atomicity of rename(2)

- filename "suffix" does not carry a meaning or associations

- availability of external access control software such as tcpd (for use
  with inetd), or super-servers with access control such as g2s,
  ucspi-tcp's tcpserver, xinetd (alphabetical order); for firing up
  nntpd aka. leafnode.

Note also that VFAT stores long names very inefficiently, so the
performance may be awful (this is a speculation however).

There may be more issues not covered here. You would need to review the
entire project and plan it before you decide if you really want to port
it.

Since Windows FAT file systems and 9x/ME in general don't give a penny
on security and access permissions, don't bother with permissions for
Win 9x, any user can trash the entire system and see everybody else's
files. You could consider encapsulating the entire WinNT/2k specific
permission stuff into a separate module that can be exchanged for fake
functions that always return success on Win 9x/ME.

Still, I think, porting leafnode to a non-POSIX system will require
rewrites of major parts, and I'm wondering if rewriting a similar
program from scratch instead would be worthwhile and less of an effort.

Did you evaluate "Hamster"? 



(I'm always wondering why people even remotely consider deploying any
server software on Win 9x/ME when there are a lot of good and easy to
set up, localized distributions of Linux and BSD around and 486- or
pentium-class machineswith like 8..32 MB RAM and 500...1000 MB hard
disks are readily available second hand, often for free; not few of them
come with leafnode as binary package, ready to install.)

-- 
Matthias Andree

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