[bugs #10577] Fix symlinks for use on Windows

[Patrick Middleton]

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/**************************************************************************/
[bugs #10577] Latest Modifications:

Changes by: 
                Patrick Middleton <patrickx@onestep.co.uk>
'Date: 
                Wed 11/03/2004 at 11:49 (GMT)

------------------ Additional Follow-up Comments ----------------------------
Filesystem links on Windows are a dead loss.  Possibly the Cygwin and MinGW 
crews will get round one day to implementing 'ln' in terms of Windows 
shortcuts, but I hope not: that'd be yet more incompatible semantics with which 
to deal.

NeXT^WApple never bothered making the ProjectBuilder pb_makefile system work 
with soft links on Windows.  A case in point: they'd have used soft links when 
building a framework so that Name.framework/Name pointed to 
Name.framework/Versions/Current/Name , which in turn pointed to 
Name.framework/Versions/{ExplicitLatestVersion}/Name .  Which would have been 
useless on Windows anyway as versioned frameworks wouldn't work, because the 
dll loading mechanism is going to find the current Name.dll , whatever that may 
be, in .../Library/Tools rather than the appropriate versioned dll from within 
.../Library/Frameworks/Name.framework.

Lately I have been trying to build stuff, notably ProjectCenter 0.4.0 on 
WindowsXP/MinGW/GNUstep base 1.10.0 and getting all sorts of build-related 
grief.

Recent revisions to $GNUSTEP_SYSTEM_ROOT/Library/Makefiles/config.make have 
introduced a make macro LN_S .  By setting that to 'echo no ln -s' on MinGW, 
and adding similar macros for rm -f and rm -rf , and setting RM_F to be rm -rf 
on MinGW, and editing all project makefiles and all standard makefiles to use 
these macros: 'make' and 'make clean' appear to work a lot better.  Watch out 
for rm -[Rr]f when editing.







/**************************************************************************/
[bugs #10577] Full Item Snapshot:

URL: <http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?func=detailitem&item_id=10577>
Project: GNUstep
Submitted by: Adam Fedor
On: Mon 10/04/2004 at 22:59

Category:  Base/Foundation
Severity:  3 - Ordinary
Item Group:  Bug
Resolution:  None
Privacy:  Public
Assigned to:  fedor
Status:  Open


Summary:  Fix symlinks for use on Windows

Original Submission:  From: andre levy <gsalevy@almonde.com>
Date: September 16, 2004 10:10:04 AM MDT
To: discuss-gnustep@gnu.org
Subject: gnustep-make for windows: linked directory is not really usable

Hi all,

I'm using gnustep-make 1.10.0. to build my application.
I'm also using mingw-3.1.0-1 for gcc3.2 and msys-1.0.10 to run make.

when I run 'make' my project is compiled.
when I later on run 'make debug=yes' the compilation is interrupted with a 
message like:
rm: 'obj' is a directory
ln: 'obj': cannot overwrite directory

I run into the same problem when I try to re-make a framework. it complains 
that 'Current' is a directory...


Follow-up Comments
------------------


-------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed 11/03/2004 at 11:49       By: Patrick Middleton <patrickx>
Filesystem links on Windows are a dead loss.  Possibly the Cygwin and MinGW 
crews will get round one day to implementing 'ln' in terms of Windows 
shortcuts, but I hope not: that'd be yet more incompatible semantics with which 
to deal.

NeXT^WApple never bothered making the ProjectBuilder pb_makefile system work 
with soft links on Windows.  A case in point: they'd have used soft links when 
building a framework so that Name.framework/Name pointed to 
Name.framework/Versions/Current/Name , which in turn pointed to 
Name.framework/Versions/{ExplicitLatestVersion}/Name .  Which would have been 
useless on Windows anyway as versioned frameworks wouldn't work, because the 
dll loading mechanism is going to find the current Name.dll , whatever that may 
be, in .../Library/Tools rather than the appropriate versioned dll from within 
.../Library/Frameworks/Name.framework.

Lately I have been trying to build stuff, notably ProjectCenter 0.4.0 on 
WindowsXP/MinGW/GNUstep base 1.10.0 and getting all sorts of build-related 
grief.

Recent revisions to $GNUSTEP_SYSTEM_ROOT/Library/Makefiles/config.make have 
introduced a make macro LN_S .  By setting that to 'echo no ln -s' on MinGW, 
and adding similar macros for rm -f and rm -rf , and setting RM_F to be rm -rf 
on MinGW, and editing all project makefiles and all standard makefiles to use 
these macros: 'make' and 'make clean' appear to work a lot better.  Watch out 
for rm -[Rr]f when editing.


-------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed 10/06/2004 at 08:04       By: 0 <None>
after investigating I found that it is because obj and Current are 'symlinks' 
to actual directories. That is, they are created with $(LN_S).

well, in config.make I found that LN_S = ln -s. This is because 'ln -s' *does* 
exist in msys but what it does is a 'cp -r'. This explains the error message in 
windows.

the workaround i used was to replace any

'rm -f linkdir; $(LN_S) realdir linkdir'
(which fails with message: 'linkdir is a directory')

with

'$(LN_S) -f realdir linkdir'
(ln -s -f forces the remove and the copy of the new dir)

impacted files were:

rules.make
Instance/framework.make

but of course obj and Current remain useless, and i live with it.













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