[PATCH 0/3] Add more winsymlinks values

[Jon Turney]

On 21/07/2021 09:19, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> On Jul 19 17:31, Jon Turney wrote:
>> I'm not sure this is the best idea, since it adds more configurations that
>> aren't going to get tested often, but the idea is that this would enable
>> proper and consistent control of the symlink type used from setup, as
>> discussed in [1].
>>
>> [1] https://cygwin.com/pipermail/cygwin-apps/2021-May/041327.html
> 
> Why isn't it sufficient to use 'winsymlinks:native' from setup?

I think in the default Windows configuration (developer mode off, no 
SeCreateSymbolicLinkPrivilege), 'native' will try to create a native 
symlink and fail, and fallback to WSL IO_REPARSE_TAG_LX_SYMLINK reparse 
point, then magic cookie + sys attribute.

This leads to cygwin installations with WSL symlinks created by 
post-install scripts, which can't be put into Docker containers [1], 
which is the original problem I was trying to fix.

[1] https://cygwin.com/pipermail/cygwin/2020-August/245994.html

I haven't yet looked at adding 'native' symlink support to setup itself, 
but it's probably going to be a bit of a pain.

> The way we express symlinks shouldn't be a user choice, really.  The
> winsymlinks thingy was only ever introduced in a desperate attempt to
> improve access to symlinks from native tools, and I still don't see a
> way around that.  But either way, what's the advantage in allowing the
> user complete control over the type, even if the type is only useful in
> Cygwin?
  If we can come up with a fixed policy that works everywhere, there is 
no advantage.  But that seems unlikely :)

I could buy an argument that 'native' should be the default (although 
maybe all that does is slow things down in the majority of installs?).