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Date: Mon, 3 Jul 2000 12:29:06 -0400
From: Chris Faylor <cgf AT cygnus DOT com>
To: friedman_hill ernest j <ejfried AT california DOT sandia DOT gov>
Cc: Tony Arnold <tony DOT arnold AT mcc DOT ac DOT uk>, cygwin AT sourceware DOT cygnus DOT com
Subject: Re: Inetutils and mount points
Message-ID: <20000703122906.C27379@cygnus.com>
Reply-To: cygwin AT sourceware DOT cygnus DOT com
Mail-Followup-To: friedman_hill ernest j <ejfried AT california DOT sandia DOT gov>,
	Tony Arnold <tony DOT arnold AT mcc DOT ac DOT uk>, cygwin AT sourceware DOT cygnus DOT com
References: <NBBBJDHEGLOMBGDMCLNEMEHFDIAA DOT tony DOT arnold AT mcc DOT ac DOT uk> <200007031615 DOT JAA11901 AT california DOT sandia DOT gov>
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In-Reply-To: <200007031615.JAA11901@california.sandia.gov>; from ejfried@california.sandia.gov on Mon, Jul 03, 2000 at 09:15:36AM -0700

On Mon, Jul 03, 2000 at 09:15:36AM -0700, friedman_hill ernest j wrote:
>I think Tony Arnold wrote:
>[Charset iso-8859-1 unsupported, filtering to ASCII...]
>>> > > mount -f -s -b e:/cygwin /
>> > > > mount -f -s -b e:/cygwin/bin /usr/bin
>> > > > mount -f -s -b e:/cygwin/lib /usr/lib
>> 
>> Is there any advantage to mountin /usr/bin and /usr/lib over making these
>> soft links to /bin and /lib? I've done the latter and it seems to work OK.
>> 
>
>I had wondered about this myself. I like the links better because I
>want to have cygnus root at d:/ and I want d:/ mounted as /. Having
>cygnus root at some lower directory just makes things vaguely
>confusing, IMO.

So, feel free to use d:\ as your root.  No one is stopping you.  This
has no bearing on whether you symlink /usr/bin to /bin or use mount.

>Anyway, I recently found out why it is done this way: it's because the
>setup program can't grok symlinks! When setup untars an installer
>tarball, it uses its own built-in untar routines which use Win32
>filesystem calls directly.  I'm not 100% sure why its this way, but I
>suppose it's so that setup can bootstrap a new installation without
>installing the DLL first.

You're apparently looking at DJ's work in progress.  The setup.exe program
on sourceware does understand symlinks.

As to why they aren't used, please check the archives.  I never
anticipated being second-guessed so often on this decision.  It's really
incredible to see the number of times that this idea has been raised and
presented to me as if this was something I would not have thought of.

The bottom line is that symlinks do not work on samba mounted
directories.

Apparently we need a FAQ entry.

cgf

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