RE: coreutils rm - win32 native port

[Eric Blake]

> The reality is quite the opposite of what you've said: have you looked in
> remove.c ? It's full of sun's proprietary functions: openat() and similar;

Those aren't Sun proprietary.  They are being added by the next revision
of POSIX, and have already been adopted by Linux.  Cygwin is not far
from adopting them as well.  And for platforms that lack them, gnulib
provides a good emulation.  Furthermore, the use of openat() closes
common security holes.  In other words, Jim and Paul moved to the
openat approach BECAUSE it is being standardized, in a freely
accessible (non-proprietary) standards process.

> emulating them is a terrible performance hit (200+% more system calls is my
> estimation) and a headache. Had it been written with only opendir() and
> unlink(), it wouldn't have had to be re-written.

And it previously was written in only opendir() and unlink(), and had
bugs.  We did the rewrite because it fixes data races and security holes.

[One more note - on this list, we prefer comments in context, rather
than top-posting]

-- 
Eric Blake