Re: [Mingw-msys] Msys 2 Work in progress

[Keith M. <kei...@us...>]

On 27/09/11 08:20, Charles Wilson wrote:
> On 9/27/2011 2:26 AM, Ralph Engels wrote:
>> As for native symlinks id propose to keep them as they do come in
>> handy, but support for older OS such as win9x would not be able to
>> use this advantage, but i hope noone uses these for anything
>> besides retro gaming boxes theses days anyway :).
> 
> MSYS no longer supports Win9x (it uses some functions available only
> on W2k+ IIRC) so that's not really an issue.
> 
> The real issue is that (1) native symlinks don't really work exactly
> like posix symlinks, (2) they are only supported on NTFS filesystems,
> not FAT -- and some 2k/xp systems still use FAT,

Surely the real issue is that native symlinks aren't supported by any
MSW version prior to Vista, irrespective of file system.  Prior to
Vista, we had reparse points on NTFS, (which might emulate symlinks to
some extent), but they certainly aren't semantically equivalent to POSIX
symlinks.

Now, Vista and Win7 symlinks are allegedly semantically equivalent to
POSIX symlinks, but I'm not entirely convinced of this, since...

> and (3) IIRC you have to have Administrator privilege to create
> native symlinks.

...you have to hold a symlink creation privilege which, by default, is
granted to administrators only.  I guess an administrator can grant it
to other users, but since I'm not an administrator for our corporate
systems, (my only exposure to Vista or later), and the administrator has
declined to grant me this privilege, native symlinks just don't work at
all, /for me/.

> Since there are /so many cases/ where native symlinks just won't
> work, it seems that it would be better to train developers to avoid
> them whenever possible, when porting to mingw/msys rather than to
> half-way kinda-maybe support them sometimes.

I agree.

-- 
Regards,
Keith.