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Re: Cygnus Support - WAS: Re: Cygwin B20 - fseek under gcc fails to reposition on text files

On Fri, Feb 19, 1999 at 01:26:31PM -0500, Larry Hall wrote:
>At 09:26 AM 2/19/99 -0800, Steve Biskis wrote:
>>I guess what it comes down to with me is that it all works just good
>>enough to serve my relatively "light" windows needs.  Yet its not quite
>>UNIXy enough to really grip me by the gonads.  e.g.  Those system
>>attribute luvin' soft links are a real bummer ! This means that I can't
>>maintain your free sources for compilation on a true UNIX file system
>>using free file sharing software (Samba).  This forces me to buy into
>>yet more Wintel if I want to get serious.  I have a real philosophical
>>problem with that.  Plus, given that you guys made a sort of virtual
>>UNIX on Windows thang it just seems like it would make more sense to
>>have a link scheme that doesn't cripple the (arguably)most popular
>>UNIX-to-Windows interconnectivity software in existence.
>
>Addressing this issue directly and completely out of context of the
>thread, I think its important for people to realize that the "system
>attribute" approach to the symlinks is for performance reasons only!
>Once upon a time, there was no need to set the system attribute in
>order to get Cygwin to recognize a symlink.  However, this tended to
>make ls -F and other utilities that wanted to know file types slow so
>the attribute idea was added to speed up these cases.  If someone is
>willing to put up with the performance issues, removing the attribute
>aspect of symlinks should allow it to work on any kind of file system,
>if I'm not mistaken about the implementation.  That said, I would
>suggest that anyone who is intrigued by this information consider 2
>things:
>
>1.  Making a change to enable symlinks over Samba or whatever would be
>     a change that wouldn't be accepted in general without a switch
>     (probably via CYGWIN).

Of course you could always investigate the documentation for samba and
look into a way of making the system attribute show up on a samba
mounted drive.  It *is* possible.

cgf

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