This is an initial attempt at adding an option to setup to choose the symlink type used. The default behaviour is left as creating magic-type symlinks, as setup currently does.
The idea being that since Cygwin (since 3.1.5) creates WSL symlinks, if possible, and there's presumably some value over magic symlinks in doing that, setup should be consistent. This could be extended to shortcut and native symlinks (which are the kind which would actually be useful, if they didn't have the all the problems they do). This doesn't propagate the chosen setting into post-install scripts using 'CYGWIN=winsymlinks:<something>', because equivalent values of <something> don't exist (currently), so you still don't get consistent behaviour. Ideally, we'd have the default option be 'do the same thing as Cygwin does' (but that's quite complex [as Cygwin embeds some knowledge about what's best for some filesystem types] and is possibly a moving target), but 'try to make WSL symlink and fallback to magic if that fails' is probably a better default choice than insisting on one type. (Orthogonally, there's still the (long-standing) issue that setup only considers the mount table, and completely ignores Cygwin symlinks when creating files (e.g. if you have /usr/share symlinked to /cygdrive/d/somewhere/, and install a package with some files under /usr/share, it's just going to ignore that and try to create files using the Windows path it thinks is right.) Jon Turney (2): Add support for creating WSL symlinks Add a command line option to choose symlink type used inilintmain.cc | 7 +++ main.cc | 29 +++++++++++ mklink2.cc | 139 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-- mklink2.h | 10 ++++ 4 files changed, 182 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-) -- 2.31.1
