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Message-Id: <200501151617.j0FGHjx16619@networking.Stanford.EDU>
Subject: Re: odd behavior of symlinks on Win XP SP2
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
In-reply-to: Igor Pechtchanski <pechtcha@cs.nyu.edu> 's message of Fri, 14 Jan 2005 20:05:34 -0500
In-reply-to: Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin@cygwin.com> 's message of Sat, 15 Jan 2005 10:32:34 +0100
Reply-to: Jeff DOT Hodges AT KingsMountain DOT com
From: Jeff DOT Hodges AT KingsMountain DOT com
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Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2005 08:17:45 -0800

Thanks for looking at this Igor. Glad to know it isn't just me. 

pechtcha AT cs DOT nyu DOT edu said:
>  And, lo and behold, on a plain WinXP SP1 (note, no SP2) I get the
> same behavior.

aha. innaresting. Well, I installed vanilla XP and then copied over a buncha 
directories from my old Win2k box, including \cygwin, and didn't play with it 
much before I upgraded to SP2. So I didn't really note anything while it was 
pre-SP2.

> Perhaps an update to Cygwin's symlink() implementation is in order? 

that's what I'm thinking.


corinna-cygwin AT cygwin DOT com said:
> 2001.  The shortcuts have been added to Cygwin in 2001. 

ah, ok. I guess I didn't really start playing/using Cygwin in somewhat ernest 
until around then anyway.


corinna-cygwin AT cygwin DOT com said:
> And it doesn't really fail.  The shortcut is still a shortcut in
> Windows Explorer.

Well, I claim that it *does* "really fail" because they (cygwin-created 
shortcut/symlinks) no longer -- on XP as compared to Win2k -- behave as they 
did. One uses file open/save dialogs very often when using windoze and on XP 
the cygwin-created shortcut/symlinks no longer behave as-documented (or 
as-in-an-explorer-window). So they don't "fail in all use cases", rather they 
"fail in some often-exercised use cases".


Seems to me we ought to see if we can't update the symlink() impl such that 
this is addressed. I'm betting there's some new attributes or whatever (as 
Igor notes) that've been added to symlinks in XP and if we can figure out what 
that is, and figure out what the minimum is we need to change in our 
cygwin-created .lnk files, we can perhaps (likely?) fix this without adversely 
affecting performance. Maybe there's some new system call on XP that we can 
use to create these buggers (if we're lucky)? After all, AFAIK, all cygwin 
cares about is the cygwin path being in the .lnk file's "comment" 
attribute/field, yes?

thanks again for looking into this,

JeffH


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