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Message-ID: <3B10580F.206B8195@ece.gatech.edu>
Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 21:27:43 -0400
From: "Charles S. Wilson" <cwilson AT ece DOT gatech DOT edu>
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To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: Serious brokeness of treating .lnk files as symlinks
References: <000201c0e4ea$e90716d0$03250059 AT ifr DOT co DOT uk> <000401c0e5bf$3eefa1a0$21c9ca95 AT mow DOT siemens DOT ru> <20010526121131 DOT C7647 AT redhat DOT com>
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Christopher Faylor wrote:
> 
> On Sat, May 26, 2001 at 12:38:32PM +0400, Andrej Borsenkow wrote:
> >>A more serious problem is that if I use tar to archive .lnk files, they
> >>are not restored properly.  They started as 'fat' links, and get
> >>restored as 'skinny' links.  This new behaviour means that no cygwin
> >>tool will be able to handle backing up .lnk files properly.
> >>
> >
> >I am afraid there is no solution without breaking compatibility.  On
> >Unix symlink does not have any "contents" except the file name it
> >points to.  So, tar saves just this filename.  This allows tar archive
> >to be moved to any other compliant system.  If you tar your files on
> >Cygwin and restore them on Unix you get identical filesystem structure
> >including symlinks.
> 
> If you archive a symbolic link, you should restore a symbolic link.  I don't
> know what a "fat" link or a "skinny" link may be but that is how it is supposed
> to work.  It should create a symlink using the current method for creating
> symlinks.

I think he means the following:
a "fat" link is a new-style symlink (e.g. a .lnk file) that contains
both the windows path and the embedded cygwin-style path

a "skinny" link is a new-style symlink (e.g. a .lnk file) that contains
only one of those two paths (my guess: cygwin-style only)

> The current problem with .lnks is what we call in the industry "a bug" and it
> will be fixed in the next release.

Cool.  Thanks for the quick turnaround on these problems.

--Chuck

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