Re: Native symlinks and setup.exe

[Gene Pavlovsky <gene.pavlovsky@gmail.com>]

That makes sense but it would be a LOT of work for many people (well,
a lot of small work for many people).

How about this kind of modification for the setup program: extract tar
archives into temp dir, after that search that temp dir for symlinks,
if they don't match the current winsymlinks option, recreate them
appropriately?

I just remembered what I did when I first discovered the winsymlinks
option (already having a 32-bit Cygwin set up for a couple of years).
I tarred my entire cygwin directory, copied it over to my Linux
server, untarred it there - which created all the symlinks, including
Cygwin's symlinks, as proper symlinks, then tarred it back, copied
back to the Windows box, untarred - voila, all symlinks are created as
native. I wonder how are Cygwin vs native symlinks stored inside tar
archive - tar knows they are symlinks but also knows which ones are
native vs Cygwin's. That's a whole lot of bother, though, and now that
I know that some further package update down the line might replace
native links with Cygwin links again (didn't expect that), I wouldn't
be willing to go to that trouble.

It should work out of the box automatically, in my opinion. Cygwin
symlinks are a kluge (e.g. I can't edit them in Far manager, the way I
can adjust a native symlink), and if using Cygwin exclusively on NTFS
filesystems, supporting symlinks, I can't see any reason to have any
on my system. The proposed solution is sensible, but it spreads
responsibility among all the package maintainers, and it will take a
long time to reach.

On 3 October 2016 at 15:08, Thorsten Kampe <thorsten@thorstenkampe.de> wrote:
> * Gene Pavlovsky (Mon, 3 Oct 2016 00:46:54 +0300)
>>
>> So, when installing, the type of symlinks doesn't honor the CYGWIN
>> option since they are just unpacked by tar as is.
>>
>> The question I'm proposing now - should `tar` be modified to honor the
>> CYGWIN option and automatically convert symlinks when extracting, if
>> necessary?
>
> Tar's task is to unpack what's in the archive. So converting is out
> of question. You can ask the maintainer of the affected packages to
> create the symlinks in the postinstall script.
>
> Thorsten
>
>
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