Re: cygwin, Coda and symbolic links

[mwoehlke <mwoehlke at tibco dot com>]

Adam Wolbach wrote:
> I'm a new subscriber looking to get some information relevant to the 
> Coda File System development at Carnegie Mellon University, which uses 
> cygwin as a platform to run on Windows 2000/WinXP. We rely heavily on 
> symbolic links for a number of different features, most significantly 
> representing conflicts within the file system. Conflicts are 
> inconsistent file system objects which are represented as "dangling" or 
> "broken" symlinks pointing to the file identifier of the inconsistent 
> object, e.g., if "foo" fell into conflict:
>
> [host]# ls -l foo
> lr--r--r-- 1 root nfsnobody [date/time] foo -> 
> @xxxxxxxx.yyyyyyyy.zzzzzzzz@realmname
>
> Coda's current symlink support in cygwin is nonexistent, but we are 
> looking to support symlinks in the same manner cygwin appears to -- as 
> special Windows shortcuts that cygwin can interpret as symlinks. 
> Allowing cygwin to see our conflicts as broken symlinks would be a big 
> win for our repair mechanisms. We looked at the internals of a Windows 
> .lnk shortcut file and (of course) part appears binary; we assume 
> somewhere along the line that the cygwin developers reverse-engineered 
> the contents of these files to hijack them for their own purposes.
>
> First question, I've hunted for this information around the website, in 
> the past mailing-list archives and the web, and it doesn't appear 
> readily available. Is there anyone on the list who knows more about the 
> internals of Windows shortcuts and could clue the Coda developers in? 
> Also, how these shortcuts should be crafted to appear as symlinks to 
> cygwin?

Maybe you could look at Cygwin's source code where it writes .lnk files? 
Or don't bother, link against Cygwin, and use "symlink()".

--
Matthew
And now back to your regularly scheduled e-mail.


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