Subject: Re: Implementing stat() with FindFirstFile()

From: Magnus Bäck <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 00:48:03 +0200

On Friday, March 27, 2009 at 03:25 CET,
     Johannes Schindelin <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Magnus, it is the official policy to reply-to-all on this list.  This
> has been mentioned in the past quite often, and it will be mentioned
> in the future, too.

Sorry, I was not aware. Doesn't seem to have been mentioned in the last
month or so. Perhaps it could be included in the list introduction
message? All people obviously won't read it, but some will.

> You actually forced me to manually look up and re-add Hannes' address.
> I do not appreciate having to waste my time like that.
>
> If that sounds negative, please understand that I am used to the ways
> of this list, and when I am annoyed by somebody not fitting in, then
> it is not totally _my_ mistake.

A plain "please use reply all" would've sufficed.

> On Thu, 26 Mar 2009, Magnus Bäck wrote:
>
> > I'd be very surprised if ZwQueryDirectoryFile() hasn't always been
> > around (I just verified ntdll.dll from NT 4.0), so that's not a
> > worry. Don't know why MSDN reports it as introduced in XP.
>
> As the current maintainer of msysGit, I refuse to have something in
> the installer I ship that relies on not-at-all guaranteed interfaces.

Although I do appreciate the importance of guaranteed interfaces,
I am also pragmatic. An incompatible change in ntdll.dll would break
vast amounts of programs, including cygwin. There is a lot to be said
about Microsoft and their APIs, but I don't think they have a habit of
changing ABIs or function semantics for userland libraries that have
been around for 15 years.

> > All right, I'll see if I can find time to take a look at this. I
> > just wanted to check that it wasn't a project policy or whatever
> > to bypass Win32.
>
> You can do whatever you want... This is Open Source.
>
> However, I will try to stay with the officially supported functionality,
> even if that makes msysGit slower -- Windows will never reach the
> performance levels of Linux anyway.

Okay, thanks. Just like you I hate wasting time, in my case with patches
that'll be refused.

-- 
Magnus Bäck
[email-masked]