That makes sense but it would be a LOT of work for many people (well, a lot of small work for many people).
How about this kind of modification for the setup program: extract tar archives into temp dir, after that search that temp dir for symlinks, if they don't match the current winsymlinks option, recreate them appropriately? I just remembered what I did when I first discovered the winsymlinks option (already having a 32-bit Cygwin set up for a couple of years). I tarred my entire cygwin directory, copied it over to my Linux server, untarred it there - which created all the symlinks, including Cygwin's symlinks, as proper symlinks, then tarred it back, copied back to the Windows box, untarred - voila, all symlinks are created as native. I wonder how are Cygwin vs native symlinks stored inside tar archive - tar knows they are symlinks but also knows which ones are native vs Cygwin's. That's a whole lot of bother, though, and now that I know that some further package update down the line might replace native links with Cygwin links again (didn't expect that), I wouldn't be willing to go to that trouble. It should work out of the box automatically, in my opinion. Cygwin symlinks are a kluge (e.g. I can't edit them in Far manager, the way I can adjust a native symlink), and if using Cygwin exclusively on NTFS filesystems, supporting symlinks, I can't see any reason to have any on my system. The proposed solution is sensible, but it spreads responsibility among all the package maintainers, and it will take a long time to reach. On 3 October 2016 at 15:08, Thorsten Kampe <thors...@thorstenkampe.de> wrote: > * Gene Pavlovsky (Mon, 3 Oct 2016 00:46:54 +0300) >> >> So, when installing, the type of symlinks doesn't honor the CYGWIN >> option since they are just unpacked by tar as is. >> >> The question I'm proposing now - should `tar` be modified to honor the >> CYGWIN option and automatically convert symlinks when extracting, if >> necessary? > > Tar's task is to unpack what's in the archive. So converting is out > of question. You can ask the maintainer of the affected packages to > create the symlinks in the postinstall script. > > Thorsten > > > -- > Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html > FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ > Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html > Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple > -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
