[Zlib-devel] [PATCH] mingw zlib import library name

[John Bowler]

From: William A. Rowe Jr.
>Both symlinks and hard links carry system permission issues, and are
>available only to admin.

I don't think that's correct.  Hard links have always been supported on NTFS, but they are not supported at the Windows OS level - so getting at them from Windows is tricky.  What this means is that if you make a hard link on NTFS the Windows OS utilities (but not the OS itself, or the NT kernel) may have problems.  (For example, backup utilities may get confused.)

It's certainly possible to make a hard link at the application level without special permissions (so far as I know) beyond the normal capabilities required for link (aka file) creation.  The POSIX subsystem allowed it back when MS supported it (last millennium) and MSYS and Cygwin allow this today (I just checked ;-), for those in doubt, try this under MSYS, or Cygwin:

echo >ttt
ln ttt qqq
echo bar >>ttt
cat qqq

Symbolic links can be created in Windows Explorer and in Cygwin, but MSYS doesn't recognize either and MSYS subverts the 'ln -s' command by making a copy (as Alon said).

Using hard links seems entirely reasonable - so far as I know ./configure isn't going to work very well under Windows PowerShell, so Cygwin and MSYS are the only sub-platforms in question.

John Bowler <jbowler at acm.org>