Documenting Cygwin on NFS, no longer only exchange-medium! Re: How to fix |mkfifo()| failure if |pathname| is on NFS ? / was: Re: [EXTERNAL] Re: mkfifo: cannot set permissions of 'x.fifo': Not a directory

Mon Aug 28 10:02:22 GMT 2023

On Aug 28 07:35, Cedric Blancher via Cygwin wrote:
> On 2023年8月27日 at 14:35, Corinna Vinschen via Cygwin
> <cygwin@cygwin.com> wrote:
> > As for FIFOs on NFS, as I wrote, they never worked as desired on NFS.
> > For kicks I tried back until Cygwin 3.3. Given this isn't a regression,
> > it won't be fixed for Cygwin 3.4.
>> I am pretty sure this is a regression, as blast, staden and other
> software were built and operated on Cygwin.

The fact that some software works doesn't mean they use a certain
feature. What, for instance, if they just created their FIFOs on a
local tmp dir?
I actually *tested* it on
- Cygwin 3.3.1-1 from 2021年10月28日
- Cygwin 3.2.0-1 from 2021年03月29日
- Cygwin 3.1.1-1 from 2019年12月18日
- Cygwin 3.0.7-1 from 2019年04月30日
- Cygwin 2.9.0-3 from 2017年09月12日
FIFOs on NFS didn't work in all cases.
We can go back in time prior to 2017 if you like, but Cygwin FIFOs were
always just created as symlinks, and NFS symlinks were never tested for
being a device, so they never have been treated as FIFOs. Also, NFS
FIFOs have never been recognized by the file handling code as Cygwin
FIFOs, they were just shown as such in stat(2).
Corinna