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Vista To Get Symlinks?

Posted by Zonk on from the sounds-like-another-os-i-know dept.

TheRealSlimShady writes "According to a post by Ward Ralston on the Windows server team's weblog, Vista server is to get symlinks as part of the SMB2 protocol." From the post: "In Vista/Longhorn server, the file system (NTFS) will start supporting a new filesystem object (examples of existing filesystem objects are files, folders etc.). This new object is a symbolic link. Think of a symbolic link as a pointer to another file system object (it can be a file, folder, shortcut or another symbolic link)."

5 of 565 comments (clear)

  1. Duplication... by Erik_the_Awful · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...is a compliment of the highest form.

  2. Funny thing is... by WindBourne · · Score: 5, Insightful

    that in about 2 years time, everybody will be running around saying that MS developed it, and that *nix copied it. Just the way it works.

    --
    I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
  3. Re:Symbolic links? by m4dm4n · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't believe that the word innovate was used anywhere except here on slashdot. While it's been a long time coming, the blog entry that originally posted this admits that all these additions are addressing limitations in SMB.

    It's not like Linux never copied an idea from another OS, yet it seems MS is not allowed to add a feature unless they thought of it themselves.

    But then I guess everyone here gets a bit bitter when there is one less thing to complain about MS.

    --

    No France
  4. Re:Allow me to be the first to say... by mrogers · · Score: 5, Insightful
    That after all those years Microsoft still has drive letters with a dirty hack (my desktop / my computer /whatever) to 'unify' them, has only broken symlink functionality (shortcuts), and only now mentiones symlinks is quite pathetic, if you ask me.

    Backward compatibility is absolutely indispensable for Microsoft - the only reason it's still the market leader after all the lawsuits, bad publicity and downright talented competition of the last few years is because nobody wants to break compatibility with their existing software, documents, networks and hardware. Microsoft understands this, and while I'm sure it drives a lot of MS developers insane, backward compatibility is always given top priority, even if it makes the architecture horribly ugly and illogical.

    (If you want to see the Unix equivalent, read the chapter on terminal I/O in Stevens' Advanced Programming for the UNIX Environment. There are backward compatibility hacks in there that are so ugly you'll wish you'd been born blind.)

  5. Re:Nevermind by bcat24 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The whole point of symbolic links is that they're transparent. That way, an application doesn't have to parse a .lnk file. The OS handles reading/writing from the correct file. Real file symlinks have been missing from Windows for too long, I think it's about time they were added. (Whether or not anybody actually uses them instead of shortcuts is another story.)