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Date: Tue, 6 Apr 2010 10:28:51 +0200
From: Corinna Vinschen <corinna-cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: 1.7 setup.exe overwrites softlink for home
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On Apr  4 14:55, Peter Wohlers wrote:
> Since upgrading to 1.7, I keep seeing weird problems with deletion
> of my homedir symlink.
> 
> Before running setup:
> pwohlers AT h1n1 ~
> $ ll /
> [...]
> lrwxrwxrwx   1 Domain Users     18 2010-04-04 14:31 home ->
> /cygdrive/d/Users/
> [...]
> After running setup:
> [...]
> Setup seems to have deleted the softlink for /home

Well... yes.  That's probably a bit unfortunate.  The current mechanism
always creates a couple of directories if they don't already exist:

  /bin
  /home
  /etc
  /lib
  /tmp
  /usr
  /usr/bin
  /usr/lib
  /usr/src
  /usr/local
  /usr/local/bin
  /usr/local/etc
  /usr/local/lib
  /usr/tmp
  /var/log
  /var/run
  /var/tmp

If the directory couldn't be created because a non-directory file uses
the same name, it deletes that file and tries to create the directory
again.  It's not perfect, but at least we know that the directories
exist, afterwards.  We could add a mode which drops the aggressive
creation strategy, but I only see that *could* make sense for home.

> Is there something magical about the /home symlink that now needs to
> be handled with fstab?  Or is it something else?

Nothing "magic", it's just the current state of affairs.  Creating a
/home mount point is certainly a good workaround, and it should even be
a bit faster than a symlink.


Corinna

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

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