Re: [RFD]: Using a new feature of Win2K for symlinks

[Corinna Vinschen <corinna at vinschen dot de>]

"Parker, Ron" wrote:
> 
> > > FWIW, this only works on local drive resources, but not to network
> > > directories.  That is a function of DFS.
> >
> > Right but this doesn't influence symlinks in Cygwin at all.
> > As I mentioned, my patch falls back if the reparse point
> > algorithm fails. This could be still tuned.
> 
> I know. It was just FYI for anyone that wasn't familiar with reparse points
> so they would have some idea of when this would come into play.  I guess I
> should have said that.
> 
> > > How about using IO_REPARSE_TAG_MOUNT_POINT tags to implement mount
> > > functionality for local resources on Windows 2000.  I know
> > its not as sexy
> > > as OS support for real symlinks, but it is a start.
> >
> > You already have that functionality thru logical drive
> > manager and that is transparent to all apps including Cygwin,
> > too. For that, we don't need to implement anything.
> 
> I didn't know if we wanted to use it for our mount facility on cygwin under
> Windows 2000.  I thought it might speed up the path handling.  It would at
> least push it to the operating system and under Windows 2000 we would have
> to check a path against fewer cygwin managed mounts.

Ah, you don't talk about volume mount points but about
directory symlinks which should be used instead of self
managed mount points in the registry, isn't it?

Hmm, this would be another nice feature. `mount' would check
the ability of the file system to manage reparse points and
`umount' would check if the given mount point is a reparse
point and it could use the reparse point code instead of the
registry in that case.

Good point.

Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen
Cygwin Developer
Cygnus Solutions, a Red Hat company