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Re: Inetutils and mount points
- To: friedman_hill ernest j <ejfried at california dot sandia dot gov>
- Subject: Re: Inetutils and mount points
- From: Chris Faylor <cgf at cygnus dot com>
- Date: Mon, 3 Jul 2000 12:29:06 -0400
- Cc: Tony Arnold <tony dot arnold at mcc dot ac dot uk>, cygwin at sourceware dot cygnus dot com
- References: <NBBBJDHEGLOMBGDMCLNEMEHFDIAA.tony.arnold@mcc.ac.uk> <200007031615.JAA11901@california.sandia.gov>
- Reply-To: cygwin at sourceware dot cygnus dot com
On Mon, Jul 03, 2000 at 09:15:36AM -0700, friedman_hill ernest j wrote:
>I think Tony Arnold wrote:
>[Charset iso-8859-1 unsupported, filtering to ASCII...]
>>> > > mount -f -s -b e:/cygwin /
>> > > > mount -f -s -b e:/cygwin/bin /usr/bin
>> > > > mount -f -s -b e:/cygwin/lib /usr/lib
>>
>> Is there any advantage to mountin /usr/bin and /usr/lib over making these
>> soft links to /bin and /lib? I've done the latter and it seems to work OK.
>>
>
>I had wondered about this myself. I like the links better because I
>want to have cygnus root at d:/ and I want d:/ mounted as /. Having
>cygnus root at some lower directory just makes things vaguely
>confusing, IMO.
So, feel free to use d:\ as your root. No one is stopping you. This
has no bearing on whether you symlink /usr/bin to /bin or use mount.
>Anyway, I recently found out why it is done this way: it's because the
>setup program can't grok symlinks! When setup untars an installer
>tarball, it uses its own built-in untar routines which use Win32
>filesystem calls directly. I'm not 100% sure why its this way, but I
>suppose it's so that setup can bootstrap a new installation without
>installing the DLL first.
You're apparently looking at DJ's work in progress. The setup.exe program
on sourceware does understand symlinks.
As to why they aren't used, please check the archives. I never
anticipated being second-guessed so often on this decision. It's really
incredible to see the number of times that this idea has been raised and
presented to me as if this was something I would not have thought of.
The bottom line is that symlinks do not work on samba mounted
directories.
Apparently we need a FAQ entry.
cgf
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