On 02/11/15 23:23, Warren Young 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.)
There may be Reasons that only admins can do symlinks. If you read about reparse-points in the DDK you start to get the sense that it was hooked on to another set of functions as a "Oh, look, we kind of get this feature for free, but with some caveats". The Community could work around the problem by creating a service which is responsible for creating the appropriate reparse-point, and allow regular users to communicate with the service. There's another reason I think symlinks are limited to administrators for now, but it's out of scope here. Anywho, back to more fossil-related matters.. I've tried to work in support for handling (reading/parsing) Windows symlinks in a library, and I encountered an interesting problem when attempting to do what would be considered readlink() in unix -- the call sometimes hangs(!). For seemingly no good reason. A quick search yielded that I'm not the only one seeing the problem; and last time I checked there had been no activity from Microsoft regarding a fix. The work-around is to use the DDK and manually parse the reparse point data manually (which is how I ended up browsing through the reparse point parts of the DDK..). Supporting symlinks on Windows would currently be a little mess. Not only is it the admin-issue, but unless they fix that intermittent hang bug, we'll require parts of the DDK and do some ugly low-level parsing in order to parse the links. -- Kind Regards, Jan _______________________________________________ fossil-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.fossil-scm.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fossil-users
