From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-11-21 16:45:04
At 09:03 AM 11/21/2003, Walter Landry wrote:
>Beman Dawes <bdawes_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>> [Help needed from Win32 programmers on the following.]
>>
>> * Can is_symbolic_link() just return false on Windows?
>
>I'm not sure what the general answer is, but in this case you only
>care about whether a link can be confused with a directory.
Yes. If general links facilities can't be added, the fallback is to provide
a POSIX-specific fix.
> That is,
>can is_directory() return true for shortcuts? A similar question
>arises for exists(). What does that return if the target of the
>shortcut doesn't exist?
Good questions. For both reference-counted and symbolic links, and for
every operation, we need to know if the operation has shallow or deep
semantics.
What keeps happening is that when I approach from the viewpoint of "How do
various operating systems behave?", I end up with a headache and little
forward progress.
I think I'll try the approach of designing what functionality and behavior
we might like the Filesystem library to have (essentially POSIX-like), and
then seeing how much can be implemented on both Windows and POSIX.
--Beman