RE: New symlinks.

[Bernard Dautrevaux <Dautrevaux at microprocess dot com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Earnie Boyd [mailto:earnie_boyd@yahoo.com]
> Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2001 12:58 AM
> To: cygwin@cygwin.com
> Subject: Re: New symlinks.
> 
> 
> Christopher Faylor wrote:
> > 
> > On Wed, Feb 28, 2001 at 11:29:54PM +0100, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> > >On Wed, Feb 28, 2001 at 10:22:32PM +0100, Heribert Dahms wrote:
> > >> Yeah, and what should
> > >>      find . | xargs ls -ld
> > >> find implicitly and write explicitly?
> > >
> > >It should implicitely find foo and explicitely write `foo'
> > >since that is given from find to xargs.
> > >
> > >My point is simply iff somebody asks for foo.lnk _knowingly_
> > >Cygwin shouldn't react with `File not found'. That's the true
> > >surprise IMO.
> > 
> > That is the issue that I was raising initially.  We can agree to
> > disagree on this fact.  It seems that people are currently 
> speculating
> > wildly without actually trying the current implementation.
> > 
> 
> And should be the only issue left to discuss.

That was also the issue I was commenting about :-)

My argument about Windows users not being so dumb that they appear was that,
as basic Microsoft tools do NOT expose the ".lnk" extension for shortcuts
(that is also for cygwin symlinks), only people using more elaborate,
developper-oriented, tools will see it. THESE guys should understand what it
means; anyway they see it not only for cygwin symlinks, but for ANY Windows
shortcut. That what I mean saying they can adapt: in fact they HAVE to, and
this is not due to cygwin; it's due to Windows :-)

> If
>   ln -s foo bar
> then
>   ls -l bar.lnk
> should output
>   ls: bar.lnk: No such file or directory
> because the user should not be concerned with implementation and from
> the users point of view bar.lnk doesn't exist.

However, here I can't agree with your view :-) Cygwin is running in the
Windows world and ANY user will also use Windows programs. These programs
MAY display to him the ".lnk" extension (even if explorer don't) so th euser
will have to be aware of it, although I also fully agree that it should
probably never display it, but just accept it if provided explicitely (what
is IIUC, what's happenning with Corinna code).

The behaviour you promote would be perfect if users of cygwin ONLY use
cygwin tools and NO native Windows tools; but in this case, frankly, they
should consider installing Linux :-) Cygwin is useful because people NEED to
have Windows on their computer because they NEED to use various native
Windows programs, that MAY show-up the ".lnk" extension, so it will have to
be aware of it...

Regards,

	Bernard

--------------------------------------------
Bernard Dautrevaux
Microprocess Ingenierie
97 bis, rue de Colombes
92400 COURBEVOIE
FRANCE
Tel:	+33 (0) 1 47 68 80 80
Fax:	+33 (0) 1 47 88 97 85
e-mail:	dautrevaux@microprocess.com
		b.dautrevaux@usa.net
-------------------------------------------- 

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