Re: [Mingw-users] symbolic links ( ln -s command)

[James S. <jam...@op...>]

On Mon, 2007-01-22 at 19:18 -0500, Salazar, German P21322 wrote:
> Thanks for all the explanations.
>  
> And as far as
> > I'm really not sure what you expect here.  If you want symlink
> > emulation, use Cygwin, which fakes symlinks with shortcuts.  If you
> want
> > what Windows provides natively without emulation -- which is the
> whole
> > point of the MinGW project (thus the "minimalist" in the name) --
> then
> > you have to settle for copies as the symlink concept does not exist
> on
> > Windows.
>  
> ...from my (ignorant) point of view, being a simple user of these
> systems (mingw and msys) I feel like if the command "ln" does not
> do in msys what does in a REAL POSIX system (whatever the reason),
> then it should not be made available in the first palce...it just
> lends itself for missleading us users.
>  
> So, if there is a command named "ln", I expect it to behave like
> "ln"and not like "cp"...that's all I am saying.

Unfortunately there may be build scripts written for platforms that do
implement a proper ln command that also need to run on the msys/mingw
environment.  As a result msys/mingw must implement something that (as
has already been said) will work in all cases.

Not implementing an ln command in msys/mingw would break the building of
many packages.  So simply removing it is not an option.

We must live with what Windows provides (or does not provide in this
case).

Regards,
James.