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Re: tar and the symlinks
On Mon, Jul 05, 2004 at 02:08:44PM -0400, Larry Hall wrote:
>At 06:54 AM 7/5/2004, you wrote:
>>I (tried to) read the FAQ carefully and did'nt find a clue.
>>
>>The problem is for the packaging of applications that install some of
>>their files in a directory that is a link. On NT4 I have a strange
>>behavior: the directory is hidding the link and the files didn't mix.
>>OK, I know that my english is not very clear (sorry but I'm french
>>:->),
>>
>>so let's explain with an example:
>>
>>1/ I am porting the xlockmore application. This is an X11 program and
>>after being compiled and configured the X11 resource files will be
>>installed in $prefix/lib/X11/app-defaults (prefix is /usr/X11R6)
>>
>>2/ I package the file within a bzip2 compress tar-ball, and this tar
>>(for example for the motif GUI xmlock) contains:
>>usr/
>>usr/X11R6/
>>usr/X11R6/bin/
>>usr/X11R6/bin/xmlock.exe
>>usr/X11R6/lib/
>>usr/X11R6/lib/X11/
>>usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/
>>usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults/XmLock
>>3/ after using setup to install this package I have in /usr/X11R6 a
>>directory named app-defaults (which is "hiding" the symlink for the
>>initial app-defaults which is a link to /etc/X11/app-defaults and is
>>created when installing xorg):
>
>Right. This is standard 'tar' behavior. There's nothing Cygwin
>specific here. 'tar's info page has this to say:
Actually, I think what is being described is probably that setup.exe's
tar emulation doesn't know about .lnk style symlinks and so it is
capable of restoring a symlink to a file in a directory which already
has a file or directory with the same name as the symlink.
The workaround for this should be to set the CYGWIN environment
variable to CYGWIN=nowinsymlinks prior to creating the symlink.
setup.exe knows about the non-lnk style symlinks so it may do
a better job at detecting this situation.
cgf
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