Add support for creating native windows symlinks

Russell Davis russell.davis@gmail.com
Sun Dec 18 20:16:00 GMT 2011


Can someone respond to this? If there's a problem with my suggested
approach I'd like to know what it is. Let me know if clarification is
needed. Thanks...

On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 11:17 AM, Russell Davis <russell.davis@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > See also http://sourceware.org/ml/cygwin/2009-10/msg00756.html
>
> Quoting from that link:
>
> - Due to the way they are used in the Win32 API, there's no way to
>  use them with POSIX paths *and* Win32 paths for interoperability.
>  So why bother?
>
> Yeah, this is rather unfortunate. I agree, since we can't store both
> the Win32 AND the POSIX path, it's not possible for native symlinks to
> function correctly both inside and outside of cygwin for all possible
> cases. But the point I've been making is this -- if we can make them
> work within cygwin for 100% of cases, and outside of cygwin for 90% of
> cases, what's the problem? It's still better than the existing cygwin
> symlinks which work 100% within cygwin and 0% outside of cygwin.
>
> If the "works within cygwin for 100% of cases" is in question, let's
> discuss that. (Any path that might be problematic as a Win32 path can
> just be stored as a POSIX path, and would fall into the bucket of
> "works inside cygwin but not outside").
>
>
> > There's also a problem with your patch.
>
> Thanks, I figured it would need some clean up and polish. I wanted to
> get it out there as a starting point.
>
>
> Thanks,
> Russell



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