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Date: Fri, 6 Nov 2009 11:44:46 +0100
From: Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: NTFS Symlinks (reparse point) redux
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On Nov  5 22:39, Larry Hall (Cygwin) wrote:
> On 11/05/2009 10:04 PM, Linda Walsh wrote:
> >     If people get used to symlinks being around as they are
> >on unix, then such a 'privilege' might become a common place
> >configuration -- thus my desire to see cygwin be able to at least
> >recognize and treat them as symlinks (first and foremost), with
> >'creating' them left open for some future possibility if they
> >become more prevalent.
> 
> If someday there's actually good support for something that can be used
> in Windows as symlinks are in Linux/Unix, I expect there will be lots of
> interest in getting them fully supported in Cygwin.  We're not there yet.
> 
> >I can easily live with linkd/delrp, myself
> >at this point, but I would really appreciate visual aids in recognizing
> >them and where they link to -- like an "ls -l" of a dir showing me the
> >path of such a symlink -- EVEN if it was a Winpath.  That'd be
> >an "instant" clue that it was a reparse-symlink and not a conventional
> >cygwin ".lnk" symlink....
> >
> >     Is that more 'palatable' with that suggestion?
> 
> Let's see.  So you'd like Cygwin to make changes to recognize reparse
> points, even though there'd be no way to manipulate them and would not
> point to a POSIX path.  That seems like allot of extra complication to the
> already complicated and slow path handling code to support a questionable

Er... Larry?  Cygwin 1.7 does recognize reparse points and especially
the new NTFS6 symlinks.  However, it only reads them, never writes them,
for the reasons repeated by cgf and me a couple of times.  You just
can't use them to store POSIX paths *and* allowing interoperability with
native Win32 processes, plus the nonsense of coupling them with a user
right, plus the super-nonsense only to allow Admins to create them by
default.  All that together makes them worse than Windows shortcuts and
they have not the faintest advantage over Cygwin-only symlinks
implemented as files with the SYSTEM DOS attribute set.


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Project Co-Leader          cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat

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