Re: canonicalize_file_name should support win32 shortcuts

[Bastien ROUCARIES]

On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 7:47 PM, Eric Blake <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 08/23/2011 11:31 AM, Sam Steingold wrote:
>>
>> First of all, newer windows do have symlinks.
>
> Does mingw support them natively?  If not, then we should get that fixed in
> mingw; perhaps by starting with an lstat() that actually works on windows
> symlinks.

It is such a mess see for instance
http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2009-08/msg00794.html they are six kind of
symlink in windows

>> Second, canonicalize is already an extension module, so why not extend
>> it to work well with a popular extension of a popular platform? :-)
>
> I'm not so concerned about supporting cygwin symlinks outside of cygwin as I
> am in supporting native windows symlinks from native windows programs.  This
> is where an lgpl implementation of dealing with native windows symlinks
> would be useful.
>
>>
>>> Maybe we should rename the canonicalize module to instead be
>>> canonicalize_filename_mode, since it does _not_ provide canonicalize()
>>> (well, canonicalize_filename_mode(file, CAN_EXISTING) is identical to
>>> canonicalize(), but the other modes are what introduce the baggage).
>>
>> yes, I think there should be a very minimalist realpath module whose job
>> is to provide the posix realpath with minimum dependencies (well,
>> minimum dependencies is my constant mantra, applicable to extension
>> modules just as much as to portability ones).
>
> canonicalize-lgpl _is_ the minimalize realpath()/canonicalize() module.
>  It's just that we need to have a mingw setup that supports native windows
> symlinks using lgpl code, before canonicalize-lgpl can take advantage of it.
>
> --
> Eric Blake   address@hidden    +1-801-349-2682
> Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org
>
>