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Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2001 10:40:26 -0500
From: Christopher Faylor <cgf AT redhat DOT com>
To: Cygwin <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
Subject: Re: New symlinks.
Message-ID: <20010227104026.B10525@redhat.com>
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In-Reply-To: <20010227064205.24363.qmail@web6404.mail.yahoo.com>; from danny_r_smith_2001@yahoo.co.nz on Tue, Feb 27, 2001 at 07:42:05PM +1300

On Tue, Feb 27, 2001 at 07:42:05PM +1300, Danny Smith 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.
>>
>>Comments?
>>cgf
>
>Expose yourself to the user, unless you have dirty secrets that might
>offend. 

I'm not sure what qualifies as a dirty secret but the whole principle
of Cygwin is that it hides things from the user.  You really can't
make this argument if you're talking about Cygwin.

I'm going for the principle of least surprise.

If I do an "ls" and don't see a file with a .lnk extension but I can
still magically reference one by typing cat foo.lnk, I think that is
surprising.

I *really* don't think that the .lnk extension should show up when
doing an "ls -l" as was suggested in another post.  That is just an
open invitation to increasing mailing list traffic: "How do I get rid
of the .lnk extension when I create symlinks????  It doesn't do this
on Linux."

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.

cgf

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