Re: [RFD]: Using a new feature of Win2K for symlinks

[Corinna Vinschen <corinna at vinschen dot de>]

"Parker, Ron" wrote:
> FWIW, this only works on local drive resources, but not to network
> directories.  That is a function of DFS.

Right but this doesn't influence symlinks in Cygwin at all.
As I mentioned, my patch falls back if the reparse point
algorithm fails. This could be still tuned.

> >       Symlinks to directories are now transparent
> >       to Windows apps at least on NTFS5 and with W2K
> >       I think that is a good start. And hopefully
> >       Microsoft will implement symlinks to regular
> >       files with that method later, too.
> 
> The problem is that when file systems with reparse points are shared across
> a network other machines do not see them as a symlink.  They see them as a
> regular file.  This is especially true for Win9x machines.

No. I have explicitely tried that. Other machines in the
network see what it is: A directory! And that directory
contains exactly the files which are expected. This is
completely ok for me.

> > Shall we:
> >
> > - Forget that patch completely?
> > - Create some new option for the user?
> > - Well, Wow! I always have waited for that! Go ahead!
> 
> How about using IO_REPARSE_TAG_MOUNT_POINT tags to implement mount
> functionality for local resources on Windows 2000.  I know its not as sexy
> as OS support for real symlinks, but it is a start.

You already have that functionality thru logical drive
manager and that is transparent to all apps including Cygwin,
too. For that, we don't need to implement anything.

Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen
Cygwin Developer
Cygnus Solutions, a Red Hat company