RE: CIFS symlinks on network share break Cygwin

["Jonathan Lanier" <jonathan_lanier at naughtydog dot com>]

>>   Yep, and it doesn't help.  It's solely down to the secureshare
>> stuff not presenting through the standard NT api; it's only visible
>> by using the shell extension dll. 
>> 
>>   (... which makes me wonder, could we possibly leverage that to do
>> some useful work for us in these situations...?)
> 
> Shure, if the DLL has a usefull documented API and a
> programmer is caring (or paid) enough to actually do it.

Well, I for one would love to have something like that.  I wonder if
NetApp could be poked/prodded to participate.  Makes me think also,
NetApp isn't the only CIFS server that supports Unix features - as
Corinna pointed out to me earlier, apparently Samba does this as well (I
haven't used Samba in years so I assumed that it could not).  And that
gives me a totally crazy idea - wouldn't it be nice if there were a
standardized, open set of extensions to allow Windows applications to
access native symlinks, attributes, and permissions over remote network
shares?  If there were such a thing, Cygwin could totally use that to
have seamless Unix-style integration with networks, as could other
applications.  If such a thing doesn't exist, it should.  If the CIFS
protocol already supports it, it should be exposed in the Windows OS.
Who do I need to vote for to make this happen?  :)

Also, it's very disappointing to hear about how the symlinks are
implemented in Vista.  Admin access?  What were they thinking?  Seems
like if Microsoft wants to solve their problems, they should re-engineer
the entire OS on top of a *nix kernel and be done with it.  Kind of like
Mac OS did...  Oh well.

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