NTFS Symlinks (reparse point) redux

[Christopher Faylor]

On Thu, Nov 05, 2009 at 07:04:09PM -0800, Linda Walsh wrote:
>Christopher Faylor wrote:
>>>>>> Will ln -s be chansed to support native symbolic links?
>>>>> No, not until, at least, native symbolic links don't require elevated
>>>>> privileges to  use.
>>> -----
>>> They don't have to..."sorta": Under the User-rights assignment plugin,
>>> where you assign what users/groups have what priviledges, you can
>>> 'allow' USERS, or ALL ATHENTICATED USERS to have the priviledge.  Then
>>> it doesn't require them to be an Administrator to use.
>> 
>> No one said "Administrator".  Corinna said "elevated privileges".  You
>> can't expect that anyone who wants to use a symlink will be capable of
>> getting additional rights.
>
>That's why I said "sorta"...if a user is on their own system, or if an
>administrator ok's it, they could set up their system to allow
>"symlinks" for normal users.
>
>I mean it is a normal, non-privileged function in linux, it might
>become that in the NT world -- its just that now no one is used to it,
>and to many tools, the 'symlinks' look like regular files or
>directories -- i.e.  the are 'hard' to see.  It's only been on Vista
>that I now see the reparse points I was already using in XP, now
>showing up with the little arrow (symlink symbol).

You're talking about doing a lot of work for something that now requires
the user to do something special but "might become that in the NT
world".  And, there's still the issue of symlinks not handling POSIX
paths.  How would you handle a symlink to a device or to something in
/proc?  What do you do when an MS-DOS path symlink points to a mount
point and the mount point changes?

cgf

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