Subject: Re: New symlinks.
From: "Ehud Karni" <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2001 17:29:47 +0200

On Tue, 27 Feb 2001 19:42:05 +1300 (NZDT),
    Danny Smith <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> cgf said:
>  
> > ...,but I'm not sure that we should ever expose the fact that a
> > symlink now has a .lnk extension to the user.
> 
> Expose yourself to the user, unless you have dirty secrets that might
> offend. 
> 
> Or maybe: All animals are equal, except some animals are more equal
> than others.  Yes, that would qualify openness,wouldn't it?

Without going into sarcasm, I agree with Danny. I don't think we should
follow M$ footsteps and hide things (files, files extension and so on).
I even think the file should be shown with the .lnk extension in the ls
output (i.e. foo.lnk -> bar). If there is a need to show native W9x/ME
sym-links Vs. Cygwin links, the ls should show the native *.lnk as is 
(i.e. native.lnk -> target) and the Cygwin sym-link with the lnk
exposed as optional, e.g. cygsym[.lnk] -> target.

As for cgf (rhetorical ?) question: All operation that relate to the
file DATA should work on the target (e.g. cat, piping to/from).
All operation that work on the file NAME should work on link proper
(e.g. rm, mv). When the link is not the BASENAME of a path it should
be substituted by its target (which must be a directory or another
sym-link). Problem may arise with program like cp (copy the content or
the name ?), I think the Linux behavior should be mimicked in this  
case (copy content unless the -d [--no-dereference] is used).

Ehud.

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