native symlink

[Jeffrey Altman]

On 4/24/2013 6:34 AM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> On Apr  3 17:29, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>> Cygwin is a POSIX environment in the first place.  Interop is fine,
>> but if it collides with POSIX, we're clearly favoring POSIX.
>>
>> Having said that.
>>
>> Chris and I had a private discussion (not the first one on the subject!)
>> and we're willing to revisit the use of native symlinks in Cygwin but
>> it will be a while before that happens.  A change to the path handling
>> code like this is not something that we'd consider for 1.7.18 which is
>> long overdue anyway.
>>
>> What I will do is to add a new CYGWIN environment variable option, along
>> the lines of the winsymlinks option(*), or, which is very likely the
>> more elegant solution, a mount option, which will result in trying to
>> create native symlinks first, and a Cygwin symlink only if creating
>> a native symlink failed.  That should help you along.
> 
> I just applied a patch to CVS which adds AFS support as well as native
> symlink support.  On AFS, native symlinks are used exclusively, on any
> other filesystem supporting native symlinks Cygwin will try to create
> them if you specify "winsymlinks:native" in the $CYGWIN environment
> variable.
> 
> After mulling over this problem I found that using an environment
> solution is better than the mount point solution, because this allows
> on-the-fly creating of native symlinks in certain scenarios, while the
> default can be kept at using Cygwin sysfile symlinks, which are still
> better suited for a POSIX environment.
> 
> For completeness, you can also specify "winsymlinks:lnk" or just 
> "winsymlinks".  This will result in trying to generate shortcut
> type symlinks, as before.
> 
> Jeffrey, please give especially AFS at try here.
> 
> 
> HTH,
> Corinna

Hi Corinna,

I've confirmed that the unrecognized reparse point fix in 1.7.18-1
does work.  Unfortunately, I'm still unable to get gcc (actually cc1)
to build even a simple hello world c program.   Is there is a nightly
binary distribution I can use to test from?

Jeffrey Altman