Re: [Mingw-users] perl symlink oddity

[Ralf W. <Ral...@gm...>]

Hello Roumen,

thanks for the suggestion.

* Roumen Petrov wrote on Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 10:48:24PM CET:
> Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> > I'm not sure I understand correctly.  What I am seeing is that in MSYS
> > perl,
> >
> >    symlink ("existing-file", "nonexisting-target-directory/target-file")
> >
> > does _not_ return a failure status (it returns 1, denoting success).

> I think that GNU autotools scripts run under MSYS should assume lack of 
> symbolic links.
> According mail to openssl list perl script
> $symlink_exists=eval {symlink("",""); 1};
> return false for active perl and true for mingw(msys?) perl. As result 
> openssl is modified to assume lack of sym.links , i.e. 
> (openssl/util/mklink.pl:
> -----
> ....
> $symlink_exists=eval {symlink("",""); 1};
> if ($^O eq "msys") { $symlink_exists=0 };
> ....

That will leave you with the same bug again in case the same issue will
ever arise on another system (just imagine a system where $^O is
"msys128").  A more maintainable change would be to actually try symlink
and check whether it has the needed semantics.  (My patch effectively
does that, under the assumption that it remains the only use of
symlink in the code.)

Please move the discussion to automake at gnu.org if it starts to veer
off of the topic of this list.

Thanks,
Ralf