Re: Native symlinks and setup.exe

[Eric Blake <eblake@redhat.com>]

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On 10/04/2016 03:53 PM, Vince Rice wrote:
>>> Obviously, a political discussion is required, to decide whether it is
>>> ok, as is, or if a change in package logic would have benefits.

The easiest way to have the discussion would be to write a patch,
instead of debating about different behaviors but then expecting others
to do the work.

> I don’t see that changing. And, as already noted, setup isn’t a Cygwin program,
> so it knows (and cares) nothing about cygwin environment variables.

setup.exe has its own untar'ing code (it is NOT forking tar, since one
of the packages setup.exe has to install is tar, and it would be a
chicken-and-egg problem if setup always forked out to a tar program if
it can't first untar the tarball containing tar).  But while setup.exe
apparently does NOT currently honor the CYGWIN environment variable with
regards to how its untar'ring code should behave on symlinks, there's
nothing that prevents you from writing a patch to teach it to do so, and
perhaps that patch can even share some of the existing code for
cygwin1.dll so that you aren't writing it from scratch.  It should
already be clear that code exists in setup.exe that handles symlinks in
tarballs - all that this thread is complaining about is that the code
doesn't do it the way that cygwin1.dll does it.  But someone has to
write such a patch, and preferably someone that cares enough to be
bothered by the current behavior (I don't, so it won't be me writing it).

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org


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