Re: PROBE-FILE and Windows shortcuts

Timofei Shatrov wrote:

On Fri, 13 Oct 2006 14:11:32 -0400, vedm <ns@xxxxxx> tried to confuse
everyone with this message:


Under SBCL, ACL and LW on MS Windows PROBE-FILE returns nil for
shortcuts. Isn't that wrong?

Under CLISP on Cugwin PROBE-FILE returns the full path of the file
which the shortcut is pointing to, so I was expecting that the other
implementations would do the same.


Really? That would make it possible to use ASDF on Windows as it was
intended, by creating shortcuts to .asd files in
ASDF:*central-registry*. Somebody should research that.


N.B. I might be out of date, I haven't had the misfortune to use
windows in quite a while now:

Windows shortcut .lnk files are more closely analogous to
KDE/GNOME .desktop files than symlinks, they're files interpreted (or
not) by a shell rather than interpreted by the VFS.

Cygiwn, however, uses special augmented shortcut .lnk files to represent
emulated unix symlinks that you create from within cygwin. - I imagine
clisp is likely just using that support, and "alien to cygwin" (i.e.
native windows) unaugmented .lnk files created outside cygwin wouldn't
work or wouldn't work as well.

The "native windows" lisps that aren't sitting on top of a unix
emulation layer that treats certain .lnk files specially (i.e. cygwin)
have no particular reason to support identical interpretation of them,
in fact it might complicate windows-native programming if they did
(since the main use for .lnk shortcuts in windows land is indeed for
the functionality .desktop files are for on KDE/GNOME - icons on the
desktop and in menus, and application programmers probably _don't_ want
them treated like symlinks. Symlinks do actually have a more direct
VFS-level analogue in Windows NT land, but IIRC (and I probably don't!)
they are limited to pointing to directories for some reason)





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