Re: canonicalize_file_name should support win32 shortcuts

[Bruno Haible]

Hi Sam,

Sam Steingold wrote in
<http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2011-05/msg00379.html> and
<http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2011-07/msg00423.html>:
> > it appears that neither canonicalize nor canonicalize-lgpl support win32
> > shortcuts (either used directly or as used by cygwin).
> > it would be nice if they did - then we would be able to use
> > canonicalize-lgpl in clisp.
> >
> > now clisp uses file w32shell.c:
> > http://clisp.hg.sourceforge.net/hgweb/clisp/clisp/raw-file/363f5b952505/src/w32shell.c
> > which works like a charm for us.
> > it would be wonderful if we could shift the burden of maintaining it to you.
> 
> Alas, clisp only supports the "*.lnk" style cygwin symlinks, not the now
> default "cookie" style.
> You will need to extract parts of winsup/cygwin/path.cc to support both 
> styles.
> My feature request still stands.

The feature request is a bit odd, because it mixes the notion of
"native Windows" and Cygwin. Cygwin is a platform that runs inside Windows.
When you build mingw programs, and redistribute them, they are meant to
run in a native Windows environment, in which no Cygwin symlinks exist.
Other non-Cygwin applications don't understand Cygwin symlinks either.

Also, we have a copyright problem: while it would technically be possible to
copy the code from winsup/cygwin/path.cc to gnulib, and update the copyright
holder to "Red Hat, Inc. and Free Software Foundation, Inc.", Red Hat's
license allows redistribution under GPL, but not under LGPL. So we could add
it to module 'canonicalize', but not to module 'canonicalize-lgpl'.
(By the way, you need to add Red Hat to the list of copyright holders of
clisp/src/w32shell.c, because of the copied code.)

Bruno
-- 
In memoriam Paul Richter <http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Richter_(Pfarrer)>