support for writing reparse-point symlinks

[James Gregurich <bayoubengal at mac dot com>]

Hi.

Around the beginning of this year, I took it upon myself to modify cygwin's dll so that when one invokes the posix symlink() function it will attempt to use a reparse-point rather than the usual cygwin symlink file. I have employed a strategy for handling reparse points in cygwin that works well in practical use. We use this modified version of cygwin to host our git repositories on Windows.

I have seen in past emails on this list that there was no interest in implementing support for creating reparse points in cygwin because there were questions about the practical usability. Our experience has been that it works fine for us over the last year. I'd like to raise the question for reconsideration by the cygwin developers. I'd be willing to contribute my and design and code to the project as I would prefer not to maintain our own custom version of cygwin forever.

Is there interest?

-James