On Oct 31, 2015, at 2:41 PM, Matt Welland <[email protected]> wrote: > > Windows will ultimately get decent symlink support.
I doubt it. Microsoft has tried to take a bite of that apple twice, and screwed it up both times. First there was the Windows 95 *.lnk file feature, which is basically only a symlink to Windows Explorer. Then in Vista they finally added true symlinks, but only Admin users can create them, and then only from within an Admin shell! cmd.exe doesn’t know how to temporarily auto-elevate itself via UAC, as with most other privileged operations. (There’s no reason that Windows builds of Fossil can’t do the UAC dance, though.) And on top of that, Microsoft made at least two bad design choices in the MKLINK interface relative to ln: 1. The order of MKLINK’s arguments is backwards relative to Windows COPY, POSIX cp, and POSIX ln. Why? To confuse people? Just to be different? Malice? Ignorance? Who can say? 2. MKLINK makes symlinks by default, opposite ln. This is arguably an improvement, since the old arguments for hard links over symlinks is largely irrelevant today, but it confuses Unix users. Microsoft has painted themselves into a corner now. Fixing MKLINK would break backwards compatibility. Historically, MS almost always leaves design errors in place. Instead of a fix, I’d expect a future version of Windows to offer a third interface, different from the first two tries. CreateSymbolicLinkEx2() or some such. Or maybe some PowerShell horridness: Windows.File.System.CreateSymbolicLink, maybe. > It is impossible for fossil to automatically reproduce an originating working > area which was constructed by symlinking different areas on disk to a single > directory structure. I’m not entirely sure what that means, but it is quite possible for Fossil to canonicalize a path, then work out whether the resulting path still points into the Fossil-managed tree. If it does, use the canonicalized path as though the user had typed that instead. If not, refuse the operation, since it exits the managed tree. fossil open already restores symlinks on POSIX systems, if you check them in with allow-symlinks enabled. _______________________________________________ fossil-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.fossil-scm.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fossil-users
