Re: tar and symlinks

[Christopher Faylor <cgf at redhat dot com>]

On Sat, Apr 28, 2001 at 01:17:42PM -0400, Charles S. Wilson wrote:
>Christopher Faylor wrote:
>> 
>> On Sat, Apr 28, 2001 at 12:51:39PM -0400, Charles S. Wilson wrote:
>> >I just noticed something with my recent ncurses-5.2-5 update.  When I
>> >did the "make install prefix=/tmp/usr" step, /tmp/usr/man/man3/*
>> >contained a lot of symbolic links.  Since I did this under cygwin-1.3.1
>> >without the "useoldsymlinks" switch (whatever it is), these symbolic
>> >links were the "new" kind; Windows understood them.
>> >
>> >However, after I created the tarball & ran setup on it to actually
>> >install the new ncurses on my system prior to uploading it, I discoved
>> >that the symlinks in /usr/man/man3 thus created were OLD style.
>> 
>> setup.exe only understands how to create old-style symlinks currently.
>> I think that this is a good thing until cygwin 1.3.1 is more widely
>> accepted.
>> 
>> So, maybe in three months or so we'll upgrade setup.exe to use the new
>> style but, for now, I think it is doing the right thing.
>
>Sounds ok to me.  BUT, tar.exe all by itself behaves the same way.  Is
>that *also* the "right thing"?  I'm not sure.

Hmm.  I should have checked out what you were saying a little more to
avoid another round of email.

My version of tar creates the new style symlinks.  I just extracted the
cygwin-1.3.1.-1.tar.gz file into a dummy directory.  The symlink files
in the lib directory were 'libm.a.lnk', 'libc.a.lnk', etc.  I verified
this with the 'dir' command.

Setting CYGWIN=nowinsymlinks caused tar to create old-style symlinks.

I don't know why you are seeing different behavior.  AFAIK, tar uses the
symlink call to create symbolic links so I don't see why it would behave
any differently from 'ln -s'.

cgf

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