Re: [Caml-list] Some comments on recent discussions

[Alain Frisch <alain@frisch.fr>]

On 12/14/2011 04:49 PM, Adrien wrote:
> Hmmm, right. But if /usr/bin/gcc is already a symlink, ocaml wouldn't be
> able to use it at all... I find it quite weird but I don't have a cygwin box
> to test.

Well, that's precisely the point: the natural way to use gcc 3 under 
Cygwin is through symlinks in order to have /usr/bin/gcc links to 
gcc-3.exe. But then ocamlopt and flexlink cannot see it.  A solution 
would have been to have them look directly for gcc-3.exe (and to fix the 
change of path for /lib/mingw), but we decided to use this opportunity 
to switch to gcc 4.

> But windows actually has symlinks. Kind of. Starting with Vista and the
> corresponding NTFS version. But by default you need to be an administrator
> to use them, you can only create a limited number of symlink in a given
> folder afaiu, some functions work on the symlink and some on the target
> (stat()/lstat()). They have a number of limitations and last time I looked
> at them, I found them to be mostly unusable because of their limitations.
>
> They're one quite big issue I've had for packages on windows: if I
> cross-compile a library from Linux, and make a tarball which has a number of
> symlink in it. What to do when untarring on windows? Try to create symlinks?
> Use hardlinks when possible? Copy the file's contents? Something else?

Even if Windows supports kinds of symlink internally, this is a rarely 
used/exposed features. I think it's a bad idea to rely on them for a 
packaging system (targeted to "native" Windows users). They would look 
"foreign" to users, and we should expect a lot of bad support from 
existing tools.


Alain