Re: symbolic linls

[David Macek <david dot macek dot 0 at gmail dot com>]

On 10. 8. 2016 3:16, Andrey Repin wrote:
> Greetings, David Macek!
> 
>>> As i understand Cygwin will soon no longer support Windows XP resp.
>>> 2003. This means that only Windows versions with native symbolic link
>>> functionality will be supported after that. Would it be possible to use
>>> only native symbolic links throughout esp. during setup.exe?
> 
>> Short answer: No.
> 
>> Long answer:
> 
>> There are limitations to NTFS symlinks, other than OS support, that make
>> them incompatible with POSIX symlinks. See
>> <https://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using.html#pathnames-symlinks> and
>> <https://github.com/git-for-windows/git/wiki/Symbolic-Links> for more information.
> 
> There's limitations, yes. But what do you mean by "incompatibility" ?

I mean differences between how NTFS symlinks work and how POSIX symlinks (that Cygwin apps expect) work. It's described on the Git-for-Windows page I linked. Quoting:

> You need the SeCreateSymbolicLinkPrivilege privilege, which is by default assigned only to Administrators but can be assigned to normal users using Local Security Policy (or via Active Directory). Note that regardless of privilege assignment, members of the Administrators group will also require UAC elevation.

> Symbolic links on remote filesystems are disabled by default (call fsutil behavior query SymlinkEvaluation to find out)

> Symbolic links will only work on NTFS, not on FAT

> Windows' symbolic links are typed: they need to know whether they point to a directory or to a file

-- 
David Macek

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