Re: Msys 2 Work in progress

On 9/27/2011 2:26 AM, Ralph Engels wrote:
> As for native symlinks id propose to keep them as they do come in
> handy, but support for older OS such as win9x would not be able to
> use this advantage, but i hope noone uses these for anything
> besides retro gaming boxes theses days anyway :).

MSYS no longer supports Win9x (it uses some functions available only
on W2k+ IIRC) so that's not really an issue.

The real issue is that (1) native symlinks don't really work exactly
like posix symlinks, (2) they are only supported on NTFS filesystems,
not FAT -- and some 2k/xp systems still use FAT, and (3) IIRC you have
to have Administrator privilege to create native symlinks.  Since
there are /so many cases/ where native symlinks just won't work, it
seems that it would be better to train developers to avoid them
whenever possible, when porting to mingw/msys rather than to half-way
kinda-maybe support them sometimes.

-- 
Chuck

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