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

[Adrien <camaradetux@gmail.com>]

On 14/12/2011, Gerd Stolpmann <info@gerd-stolpmann.de> wrote:
> Am Mittwoch, den 14.12.2011, 14:37 +0100 schrieb Adrien:
>> On 14/12/2011, Alain Frisch <alain@frisch.fr> wrote:
>> > As a concrete problem, until a few days ago, the mingw port could not be
>> > used with recent versions of Cygwin without some small hacks (like
>> > copying manually /bin/gcc-3.exe into gcc.exe, and passing more
>> > directories to flexlink).  No big deal, but it can discourage beginners.
>>
>> Actually, I think that you should have used the "/etc/alternatives"
>> symlinks: /usr/bin/gcc points to /etc/alternatives/FOO and you can make
>> this
>> FOO symlink point to the /usr/bin/BAR binary that you want.
>
> There are no (usable) symlinks in Windows. Cygwin includes an emulation,
> but it is not understood by win32 programs, and hence this mechanism is
> unavailable for ocamlc/opt and flexlink.

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.

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?

Regards,
Adrien Nader