Cygwin, symlinks, and wine

[Larry Hall (Cygwin)]

On 08/28/2009 01:36 AM, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 01:31:11AM -0400, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>> On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 09:52:26PM -0700, Dan Kegel wrote:
>>> Although it seems strange to run cygwin on top of wine, doing so would
>>> make it possible to run a lot of build scripts for windows apps
>>> unchanged, which would be very handy in verifying that wine works
>>> properly (see http://wiki.winehq.org/UnitTestSuites ).
>>>
>>> The problem is, wine doesn't support the system attribute on files
>>> well.
>>
>> The system attribute isn't needed for the .lnk type of symlink that
>> you're talking about.  The file just has to be read-only.  So something
>> else is wrong.
>
> Ah, sorry.  I take that back.  I didn't read the whole bug report.
>
> These *are* the system-style symlinks, probably created by setup.exe.
> Changing them to .lnk type should fix that problem.  Why not just write
> some sort of converter script to do that?
>
> Regardless, the comment about a patch still holds despite the code
> offered in the wine bug report.

And I would go so far as to say that this wouldn't be a great solution anyway
since:

   1. It only fixes the problem for Cygwin, so other apps run in Wine that
      depend on the system attribute setting would need to have their own
      patches applied to them.  There's probably not allot of these but
      still.
   2. Symlinks in Cygwin 1.7 have moved away from using the Windows
       style shortcuts and back to something like the "old" symlinks, with
       modifications to handle Unicode paths.

This leads me to believe the best course of action is to solve this problem
in Wine and/or through  Unix/Linux means, rather than relying on patches
to the apps running in Wine.  That said, I agree with Chris that recreating
the symlinks that are created by 'setup.exe' as the Windows-style symlinks
should solve the problem in the short run anyway.

-- 
Larry Hall                              http://www.rfk.com
RFK Partners, Inc.                      (508) 893-9779 - RFK Office
216 Dalton Rd.                          (508) 893-9889 - FAX
Holliston, MA 01746

_____________________________________________________________________

A: Yes.
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 >> A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation.
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