RFC: Reparse Point/NT Symlink Support [3]

[Alexandre Julliard]

"Erich E. Hoover" <erich.e.hoover at gmail.com> writes:

> If this doesn't sound too crazy then I can put together the
> modifications to make this happen.  As part of that I'd like to
> introduce a tool (command 'wineprefix'?) that configures the Unix
> environment properly for Linux/BSD to allow the shell to function with
> this variadic symlink so that users like Martin Storsjö (and myself)
> can just run the tool to be dropped into a shell where ${WINEPREFIX}
> inside a symlink will be treated appropriately.  (Part of why it's
> taken me a while to respond to this thread has been putting together a
> "proof of concept" of this tool to make sure that the idea works,
> which I can now confirm.)  Please let me know what you guys think,
> hopefully this sounds better to folks.

You are still trying too hard to shoehorn the complexity of reparse
points into working Unix symlinks, which makes it necessary to depend on
all kinds of exotic non-portable functionality.

You should forget about making these transparent at the Unix
level. Focus on implementing the full semantics of reparse points,
including arbitrary tags and data, in a generic, easily extendable way,
using only standard Posix APIs.

Once you have this working for a range of different tags, with tests to
confirm compatibility, we can think about what subset of reparse points
would make sense as pure Unix symlinks, and add a special case for
these.

-- 
Alexandre Julliard
julliard at winehq.org