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Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2001 12:51:18 -0500
To: cygwin@cygwin.com
From: "Larry Hall (RFK Partners, Inc)" <lhall@rfk.com>
Subject: Re: New symlinks.
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At 11:43 AM 2/27/2001, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> >> I am, as always, more concerned about supporting this feature in
> >> the long run.  If allowing foo.lnk to be referenced explicitly causes
> >> even one person confusion, I don't think that it is worth it.  It
> >> is certainly non-UNIX behavior.
> >
> >I think it's correct behaviour. Cygwin doesn't show the .lnk
> >suffix by itself but nevertheless, to return a `file not found'
> >on `ls foo.lnk' wouldn't be correct. It's simply the truth:
> >The file `foo.lnk' exists and is a symlink.
>
>Again, it is surprising behavior.  Such a file would not exist on UNIX.
>I personally think that we should hide implementation details like
>"Oh yeah, we added a .lnk extension to all of our symbolic links"
>from the user.  There is no reason for them to know or care about
>this detail.


Certainly Windows tries to take this tack, although I loathe to point to 
them as an indication of what should be done.  Personally, I've never 
liked the notion of a file type being indicated by its extension though
so I'm always for something that removes this dependencies or makes it
transparent.  Still, I'm pontificating, since I haven't looked at the code
or tried to see how/if this could be done in the context of Windows 
shortcuts.  Overall, while I like the inter-operability gains, bring 
Windows semantics into UNIXy symbolic links will be a problem.


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