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Re: Serious brokeness of treating .lnk files as symlinks
Christopher Faylor wrote:
>
> On Sat, May 26, 2001 at 12:38:32PM +0400, Andrej Borsenkow wrote:
> >>A more serious problem is that if I use tar to archive .lnk files, they
> >>are not restored properly. They started as 'fat' links, and get
> >>restored as 'skinny' links. This new behaviour means that no cygwin
> >>tool will be able to handle backing up .lnk files properly.
> >>
> >
> >I am afraid there is no solution without breaking compatibility. On
> >Unix symlink does not have any "contents" except the file name it
> >points to. So, tar saves just this filename. This allows tar archive
> >to be moved to any other compliant system. If you tar your files on
> >Cygwin and restore them on Unix you get identical filesystem structure
> >including symlinks.
>
> If you archive a symbolic link, you should restore a symbolic link. I don't
> know what a "fat" link or a "skinny" link may be but that is how it is supposed
> to work. It should create a symlink using the current method for creating
> symlinks.
I think he means the following:
a "fat" link is a new-style symlink (e.g. a .lnk file) that contains
both the windows path and the embedded cygwin-style path
a "skinny" link is a new-style symlink (e.g. a .lnk file) that contains
only one of those two paths (my guess: cygwin-style only)
> The current problem with .lnks is what we call in the industry "a bug" and it
> will be fixed in the next release.
Cool. Thanks for the quick turnaround on these problems.
--Chuck
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