[Coin-discuss] Query: Problems with gzip'd i/o, CoinUtils, Cygwin/minGW/Win2K

[Lou Hafer]

Ted, Andreas,

	Thanks for the quick replies.
	
	Andreas, you may remember that I was ranting about symlinks back at the
DIMACS workshop.  The autoconf test (AC_PROG_LN_S) that checks whether symbolic
links will work is fundamentally flawed for this cygwin/minGW environment.
Partly, it's been hijacked by some project called DJGPP.  You can grep for DJGPP
in the configure script to see what's actually done --- this is why conf$$.exe
appears in the test; apparently a `helpful feature' of DJGPP is to conclude that
anything without an extension is executable.  Partly, configure runs the test in
the cygwin environment, where symlinks work, but the executable will run in
minGW, where they don't.  A working test for our situation would require
actually compiling and running a test program to see if it could read a file
through a symbolic link.

	A good quick fix would be to avoid symlinks in the cygwin environment.
	
	I will see if I can make some time to poke a bit more at the problems
for gzip'd file i/o. I don't see why input should work for the first hundred 
lines and then start to fail. I'd like to at least establish that the problem is 
definitely down in the gz libraries, and not in the low-level CoinUtils stuff.

							Lou