Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: vfat patch for shortcut display as symlinks for 2.4.18 | From | Nicholas Miell <> | Date | 09 Jun 2002 14:36:49 -0700 |
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On Sun, 2002-06-09 at 13:53, Albert D. Cahalan wrote: > Nicholas Miell writes: > > > Putting shortcut support into the VFAT driver is as bad a decision as > > the automatic text-file CRLF->LF conversions was, for several reasons. > > No, NOTHING done with VFAT is as bad as the text conversion. > That one was not implementable in any sane way, unless you > think sequential read-only access (like /proc) is sane. > > > First of all, some programs (WINE) will actually want to use the .lnk > > files, and transparently converting them to symlinks will complicate > > that. > > WINE needs to be able to handle a symlink on ext2, so it can > damn well convert back. It's OK to give WINE some hack to get at > the content; it's not OK to hack bash to interpret .lnk files.
Why would bash even want to interpret shortcut files? They're a proprietary, Windows-only format that have no real use beyond icons in the Start Menu or on the desktop. Hacking the filesystem to treat something that fundamentally is not a symlink as a symlink is even stupider than hacking bash to do the same thing.
> > More importantly, shortcuts are a hell of a lot more complicated than > > has been implied. Not only can they point to local files or UNCs (the > > \\server\share\path notation), they can also point to any object in the > > (Windows) shell's namespace, which includes lots of virtual objects that > > don't actually exist on disk. > > One can live with an occasional broken symlink: > "foo" --> "[UNIMPLEMENTED LINK TYPE]"
One can also live with "foo.lnk". (It's much easier and saner, too.)
> > Finally, I haven't seen any justification for why symlinks on VFAT are > > needed, beyond some vague statements that it's useful when dual booting. > > Face it, VFAT isn't a Unix filesystem and introducing ugly hacks to make > > it more similar to one will only cause problems in the long run. If you > > want symlinks, use a real filesystem or use umsdos on your favorite FAT > > filesystem. (Assuming that umsdos still works...). >
> [ insane abuse of VFAT for multi-user systems ]
You're not serious, right?
- Nicholas
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