On 25/11/2025 04:04, C. Linus Hicks via Cygwin wrote:
The company gave us a new VDI with Windows 11 installed to replace
the old VDI where Cygwin 64 had been installed on Windows 10.
Afterinstalling Cygwin on the new machine, I noticed a strange
problem with it that I was just now able to track down.>
The files created in /etc/fonts/conf.d by the libfontconfig-common
package were not created as symlinks but rather as flat files having
contents like so:
!<symlink>../../../usr/share/fontconfig/conf.avail/10-hinting-
slight.conf
This is an original ('sys') style Cygwin symlink: a plain file with
contents like that, and with the system attribute set.
See https://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using.html#pathnames-symlinks
If this isn't functioning as a symlink for Cygwin (your report is
unclear on the problem you are experiencing, other than noting a
difference between these installations), then maybe something is
interfering with the system attribute getting set?
There are symlinks scattered around /usr/share in various
directories that were created correctly, and if I execute ln -s in
the /etc/fonts/conf.d directory, it will create an entry that acts
like a symlink.
I tried reinstalling the libfontconfig-common package using the
Cygwin installer, but it didn't help. I also tried downgrading to a
different version, still no help.
Perhaps I am misunderstanding which package install should be
creating these symlinks, but looking for help here, and not
understanding why they were created incorrectly on the initial
install.
As of version 2.911 (December 2011), setup is more configurable and
consistent about how it creates symlinks (to address other problems with
them).
See https://cygwin.com/pipermail/cygwin-announce/2021-December/010378.html
If you want your symlinks to be created as WSL reparse points, then run
setup with --symlink-type=wsl.
(There's probably an argument to be made for that being the default on
sufficiently recent Windows versions).
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