Re: 1.7 setup.exe overwrites softlink for home

[Tim McDaniel <tmcd at panix dot com>]

Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> Peter Wohlers wrote:
> > Since upgrading to 1.7, I keep seeing weird problems with deletion
> > of my homedir symlink.
> >
> > Before running setup:
> > pwohlers@h1n1 ~
> > $ ll /
> > [...]
> > lrwxrwxrwx   1 Domain Users     18 2010-04-04 14:31 home ->
> > /cygdrive/d/Users/
> > [...]
> > After running setup:
> > [...]
> > Setup seems to have deleted the softlink for /home
>
> Well... yes.  That's probably a bit unfortunate.  The current mechanism
> always creates a couple of directories if they don't already exist:
...
>   /home
...
> If the directory couldn't be created because a non-directory file
> uses the same name, it deletes that file and tries to create the
> directory again.  It's not perfect, but at least we know that the
> directories exist, afterwards.  We could add a mode which drops the
> aggressive creation strategy, but I only see that *could* make sense
> for home.

Um, so I suppose it's doing a test for symlinks specifically.  Why not
just test that /home is a directory via stat(), and if so, leave it
alone?  Perhaps it doesn't have stat() available and it would be extra
work to cobble it together in that environment?

--
Tim McDaniel, tmcd@panix.com

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