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Message-Id: <3.0.5.32.19990219132631.0162d0c0@pop.ma.ultranet.com>
Date: Fri, 19 Feb 1999 13:26:31 -0500
To: "Steve Biskis" <mlx AT san DOT rr DOT com>,
        "Cygnus Solutions" <cygwin AT sourceware DOT cygnus DOT com>
From: Larry Hall <lhall AT rfk DOT com>
Subject: Re: Cygnus Support - WAS: Re: Cygwin B20 - fseek under gcc
  fails to reposition on text files
In-Reply-To: <00b301be5c2d$05517220$080216c0@newt.san.rr.com>
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At 09:26 AM 2/19/99 -0800, Steve Biskis wrote:
>I guess what it comes down to with me is that it all works just good enough
>to
>serve my relatively "light" windows needs.  Yet its not quite UNIXy enough
>to really grip me by the gonads.  e.g. Those system attribute luvin' soft
>links are a real bummer !  This means that I can't maintain your free
>sources for compilation on a true UNIX file system using free file sharing
>software (Samba).
>This forces me to buy into yet more Wintel if I want to get serious.
>I have a real philosophical problem with that.  Plus, given that you guys
>made a
>sort of virtual UNIX on Windows thang it just seems like it would make more
>sense
>to have a link scheme that doesn't cripple the (arguably)most popular
>UNIX-to-Windows interconnectivity software in existence.

Addressing this issue directly and completely out of context of the thread,
I think its important for people to realize that the "system attribute" 
approach to the symlinks is for performance reasons only!  Once upon a 
time, there was no need to set the system attribute in order to get Cygwin
to recognize a symlink.  However, this tended to make ls -F and other 
utilities that wanted to know file types slow so the attribute idea was
added to speed up these cases.  If someone is willing to put up with the
performance issues, removing the attribute aspect of symlinks should allow
it to work on any kind of file system, if I'm not mistaken about the
implementation.  That said, I would suggest that anyone who is intrigued
by this information consider 2 things:

  1. Making a change to enable symlinks over Samba or whatever would be
     a change that wouldn't be accepted in general without a switch 
     (probably via CYGWIN).

  2. Symlinks would still be Cygwin specific.  Don't expect to be able to
     use a Cygwin symlink on a shared partition with Linux when booted to
     Linux (or vice versa for that matter)!:-)

There's more for the mix!:-)


Larry Hall                              lhall AT rfk DOT com
RFK Partners, Inc.                      (781) 239-1053
8 Grove Street                          (781) 239-1655 - FAX
Wellesley, MA  02482-7797               http://www.rfk.com

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