MSYS using Junctions quirk

I'm not sure whether I'm encountering a bug or just getting bitten by
lack of knowledge.

I have an ancient Fujitsu p2110 notebook, given to me by a friend when
she upgraded to a faster box.  It's decidedly low end, with a
Transmeta 867mhz CPU, an IDE 4 HD, and a whopping 256MB of RAM, of
which 16MB are taken off the top by the CPU for "code morphing".  It
came to me with WinXP SP2 installed, and was frozen snail slow.  I
swapped the original 30GB HD for a 40GB from my SO's dead laptop,
reformatted, partitioned, and installed Win2K Pro SP4, two flavors of
Linux, and FreeDOS.  Properly tuned and configured, Win2K takes about
80MB of RAM when loaded, and is actually usable.  (Most of what I
might need to run under Windows works in 2K.  The stuff that doesn't I
can live without.)

I installed the MYS tools because I wanted a set of Win32 ports of the
common *nix utilities, and a working Win32 version of bash.  I did not
install the MinGW compiler and associated tools - the machine is way
too underpowered to do development on it.

NTFS5 supports hard links for files and junctions for directories.  I
use Hermann Schinagl's Link Shell Extension
(http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/hardlinkshellext.html)
which provides context menu entries to create and manipulate such
things.  Under Win2K/WinXP it does hard links out of the box.  Under
Vista/Win7 it supports proper symbolic links, too.*

I wanted a *nix like file system, so I used LSE to create a junction,
and have Msys/1.0/bin appear as /bin.  That works fine.  I
subsequently decided I'd prefer it to appear as /usr/bin, deleted the
old junction, and created a new one.  That did *not* work fine.  The
junction was created, /usr/bin shows in the file system and I can list
the files in it, but attempting to actually execute any of them fails.
 I can type the command at the prompt and I simply return to the
prompt with the command not actually running.  If I create the
junction as /bin, things work.  It appears Msys tools only work
correctly through junctions created off of root, and fail if the
junction is created off a sub-directory.  This seems to be Msys
specific, as I have other sets on Win32 ports of *nix utilities, like
the Gnuwin32 collection, that do work as expected.

Right now, I have Msys mapped via a junction as /bin, and can live
with it.  But I'm curious: *should* creating the junction as /usr/bin
have worked, or am I running into an inherent limit in how Msys works,
or have I found a bug?

* And too my surprise, a recent update to LSE pointed to an open
source driver written by a Japanese developer that enables true
symlinks in 2K and XP.  NTFS5 has the underlying infrastructure to
support symlinks, but it's not exposed by the 2k/XP kernel.  The
driver amends that oversite.

______
Dennis
https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519

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