On 11/5/13 8:52 AM, Randy Defauw wrote: > Any thoughts regarding supporting symlinks on Windows? Windows has supported > symlinks since Vista: > > http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa365680(v=vs.85).aspx > > Supporting cross-platform symlinks where possible will ease some compatibility > pain for cross-platform development.
Probably the biggest issue here is that by default creating symbolic links requires administrator access on Windows. Users can be granted the permission without being an administrator. However, lacking the functionality for all users (as is the case on unix) makes it possible to cause problems for users on Windows without the permission. http://superuser.com/questions/124679/how-do-i-create-a-link-in-windows-7-home-premium-as-a-regular-user I think nobody has put the effort into figuring out the appropriate way of dealing with this. The obvious thing to do would be to fall back to the current behavior if the permission isn't available. My concern would be that this would be confusing when the feature works for some users and doesn't for other users based on something as obscure as Windows a user permission.
