Vista's Limited Symlinks

An anonymous reader writes, "Symlinks haven't really been added to Windows Vista. It seems that the calls to the Windows Vista symlink API only occur during the creation of such files or when accessing them from Windows Explorer. What this means is, you can't access symlinks from another OS. To be fair, you probably didn't expect to be able to dual-boot into XP and suddenly have access to the symlinks you created on the Vista partition earlier that day. But then again, you probably expected to be able to access these symlinks through a network share/UNC path or as files on a webserver. But you can't." From the article: "Clearly, Vista's symlink API isn't complete — hopefully this is something that can be patched via a hotfix and that we don't have to wait for Fiji to get something as simple as UNC support built in."

Comments

Broken Window syndrome

[davidwr]

Time to call in the code inspectors.

You just have to buy the upgrade..

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's get real. If the OS was perfect nobody would buy the next version. I bet that 80% of purchases are made by people that secretly hope there's finally a version of Windows that just works.

[and there's of course the not-invented-here syndrome - maybe symlinks are GPL-ed? :-)]

Same ol' show

[marcello_dl]

A couple of days ago, the ranting of some MS manager about interoperability, here on slashdot. But when it's time to ship, having working symlinks (rocket science apparently) for basic interoperation purpose is not there. Same old Microsoft, expect same old frustrations with Vista.

I don't think they get it

[value_added]

Windows 2000 promised administrators the ability to manage everything from the command-line. That turned out to be true mostly for a small list-of-old-DOS-utilities value of true. Additionally, we were offered junctions/mount-points which sortofkindof worked, but weren't fully supported. Sysinternals offered their 'junction' utility which worked a bit better, but again, not really. Now with Vista have SFU or SFU-as-subsystem that promises everything that Windows Scripting Host promised and more!

I expect that whatever hodge-podge of new features, one-off Resource Kit utilities or whatever else Microsoft decides to offer in their latest and greatest, I'll continue to rely on the folks at Cygwin to take advantage of whatever limited functionality exists in Windows, and then implement workarounds for the inconsistencies and shortcomings to make something useful and sane with it. In the meantime, I'll bet my right monad that a future Slashdot headline will read Vista's Borked NFS Client.

Vista Symlinks not accessible via in XP and 2000

[Yahma]

People are asking questions about VISTA Symlinking on MSDN. See this thread. The Vista symlink seems to have not much more functionality than "shortcuts" did in Windows 95 or Windows 98.

The issue at hand is why was the API left so incomplete that remote accessing a share that utilizes Vista Symlinking does not work? This is a large oversight on Microsofts part, and basically makes Symlinking useless. Fortunately, Symlinking works great via Samba. Another reason to stick with Linux..

Yahma
ProxyStorm - An Apache based anonymous proxy service for security minded people.

22..

[psavo]

22 bloody years...

<nelson>haha!</nelson>

Re:Shortcuts are nothing new

[Knuckles]

Vista introduced true UNIX-style symbolic links

The article is about how it doesn't.

Re:obligatory quote

[drgonzo59]

No. Those who understand Unix use ... Plan9! /ducks

Don't worry, it isn't.

[mrchaotica]

There's plenty of other worse things about Vista; this is just an amusing side note.

Re:Holy negativity Batman!

[Sardaukar86]

Rubbish - a corporation with large financial and technical resources such as Microsoft doesn't half-implement a simple OS concept like symlinks because they are simply unable to do it properly.

It's their OS, they know all the dirty little secrets of their code and they can make it happen if they want to. Rather, I suspect it doesn't suit them to have a completed api at present.. in fact I'll even hazard a guess that (unsurprisingly) their motivations in this matter will be less to do with product quality or customer satisfaction and more about whatever FUD campaign is currently coming up to the boil in Redmond.

The problem is replication

[SuperKendall]

Why this obsession with UNIX?

I think that was more an example of something they could have done - basically a good choice, even though there are others.

The main problem I see with Microsoft is the incredible degree to which they duplicate something that already exists:

* Operating system, as noted they could base this on UNIX or something else and saved a lot of effort.

* Filesystem - why does the world need NTFS? There are other really good file systems around. If it offered features like ZFS I could see it but about the only FS I'd like to use less than NTFS is FAT, and that's actually a better choice for small devices because it's simpler!

* Display format - PDF ain't good enough for Microsoft, hell no, we need a brand new document/display language. Metro!

* Porgramming langauges. We can't extend Java just the way we like without community review? Screw you all, we're building a new ball from scratch and running home!

* I think we need an XML based document format. It's not like one already exists or anything, let's create one from scratch!

Think of how far the industry as a whole would be along if Microsoft actually contributed to any of those fields instead of devoting huge numbers of resources to creating anew. Microsoft single handedly has set the computer field back probably a decade or more.

Re:The problem is replication

[drgonzo59]

I agree. Re-inventing the wheel could be good if it is the right wheel, at the right time for the right vehicle, otherwise it doesn't make sense.

I watched a PBS show the other day where Bill Gates was taking questions from college students. One of the questions was "Who do you look up to for advice?" and he said "Nobody!" and that basically he is rich and smart enough that he _always_ just came with future directions for his company (MS) completely on his own. He talked how sometimes it failed (remember WebTV included in Windows 98?), and I thought to myself how that mentality of "we don't look at others, we are the smartest, biggest and we'll re-invent everything" has probably hurt MS just as much as it helped. Not many operating system concepts have come out of Microsoft as being better than what was already out there. There was always a better kernel, a better file system, a better network stack, a better security model, a better system API and so on. (By "better" I mean better implemented practically, sure NT has a great security model but practically it is not the best, and "theoretically" Windows XP would support POSIX...but in reality it doesn't)

Re:The problem is replication

[SuperKendall]

I hope you are joking with regard to C#. Have you used both languages? Java is not the end-all, be-all of object-oriented languages! Given the choice to use either Java or C#, I'd take C# every single time.

Being a copy of course they were able to imrpove on a few things. Of course they lack the depth of the Java libraries...

The .NET Framework is superior to Java's in terms of organization and naming conventions. (It is not as deep as Java's third party support, however.)

I sure hope you aren't referring to the bass-ackwords way they did the capitalization. That was an atrocity and really did away with a lot of historical conventions, for no good reason and a number of bad results.

I consider Visual Studio superior to any of the sluggish-feeling-type-type-oh-wait-now-I've-gotta- garbage-collect-so-I'll-stall-for-awhile Java-based ones that everyone raves about for Java.

Eclipse is really more powerful, and more extendable - it's the same way that Firefox is really nicer to use than IE, because there are a huge variety of plugins.

It takes more resources to run no doubt, but I find it preferrable.

C# is more expressive than Java, as well. I use Java daily, but at times it feels like the language has been greatly watered down so it would be the next COBOL.

Now that I'd quibble with, at least from Java 1.5 onward. What do you find "more expressive?"

You fail to realize that MS doesn't care one way about being interoperable. Why would they want a cross-platform filesystem? Their game is being proprietary.

Of course I realize that! That is my whole point, that approach is wasteful and duplictitive and setting the entire industry back. Look to Apple for a model, they are releasing webkit stuff back to the community along wtih GCC patches and freebsd stuff as well.

That may be thier "game" but setting people on fire can be a "game" as well, I don't care. I still consider it evil.

Anyway, complaining about the whole choice thing is rather silly. Isn't that what open source is all about?

YOU are failing to realize that open source is about the choice to do what you want with software, to extend it in ways the makers never considered and to have others benefit as well. At least that is what the GPL is about, and why there is a divide between open source advocates.

Re:don't use NTFS

[l3v1]

my Documents and the whole user directory on an ext3 and it works great

Good that it does, but you shouldn't advertise it as being true ext3 since it isn't. The ext2 ifs windows thing doesn't support ext3 journaling, it just treats the ext3 volumes as if they were ext2.

Point me to a true xfs windows driver and I'll be happy.

Re:"Links" are not necessarily a fs feature

[MORB]

POSIX isn't supposed to be closer to the metal than the native OS api. It's supposed to be a standard, non os-specific way to access files.

It's the job of the OS makers to provide a POSIX implementation that works on top on the native api. You'll find that developers writing cross-platform apps are not fond of having to conditionally use platform specific code, especially in situations like file io that has been standardized for ages.

Re:If they would have kept their original ideas

[RAMMS EIN]

There were very many good ideas about NT. Microsoft either actually were planning to deliver these features, but somehow didn't manage, or they deliberately misled people so that these people would wait for NT, instead of buying a competing OS. Similarly with Vista: they promised many great features, but almost all of the features I've seen people raving about have been dropped in the meantime.

Re:don't use NTFS

[rucs_hack]

there's a big difference between 'could' and 'allowed'.

I doubt that NT or any other windows would have much trouble on ext2/3, but microsoft are not exactly likely to allow it.

Re:Don't underestimate Vista

[Jesus_666]

Maybe it's not right to continually bash Vista for a few problems, but Vista doesn't have a few problems - it has heaps of them. It's late, most of the features we were promised are missing and others are badly implemented - in this case they promised us full-blown symbolic links and in reality delivered a functional equivalent to Windows 95's link files.

I'm sorry, but much of the continual bashing of Vista comes from the fact that we're continually discovering new flaws. It's hard to stop bitching when you're subjected to a continuous stream of news saying that "Vista feature X was dropped/doesn't work as advertised/is implemented in a bad fashion".

Re:If they would have kept their original ideas

[badfish99]

At the time, it looked as though many commercial customers (especially the US government, as I recall) would insist on posix compliance. Also, MS wanted to appeal to customers wanting OS2. So NT was indeed designed with posix and OS2 emulation modules, as well as a Windows API layer.

Of course this was just for marketing purposes: once the customer was baited into Microsoft lock-in they would discover that this compatibility stuff was all half-backed and buggy, and would switch to using the Windows API instead.

Re:Holy negativity Batman!

[plopez]

Rubbish - a corporation with large financial and technical resources such as Microsoft doesn't half-implement a simple OS concept like symlinks because they are simply unable to do it properly.

Having worked for fortune 500 companies, I would say that you are giving them more credit for wisdom than is usually the case.

The environments I have see they usually:
1) Have a host of managers who have a poor grasp of what they are managing

2) Tend to go with the lowest bidder when contracting out for services, e.g. outsourcing programming and IT teams. This means monkeys usually end up doing thier software development and IT work.

3) Are run on an industrial paradigm, even in service industries. A 'let's ship tons of crap to make money' while ignoring the quality of the crap.

4) Managers make decisions based more on ego than business cases.

5) Treat people as commodities, leading once again to the hiring of monkeys to get critical tasks done.

6) Anything flash, regardless of utility takes precedence over the less sexy but often import details. E.g., nice new eye candy for Vista but a half-assed file system.

I have also worked in SME environments. I have observed that the larger the company, the dumber it gets. Larger compaies have plenty of places where dead wood can accumulate, can lose money at a rate that would sink an SME it short order and attract politcal people who know how to shift blame.

I have helped my current employer, an SME, grow to the point where it is getting too big for me. I am seeing the dysfunnctional aspects begining to develop. It is time for me to move on.

But all-in-all just because the company is big does not mean it possess an special wisdom. Esp. a monopoly which does not have to compete.

Re:Shortcuts are nothing new

[kimvette]

Please tell us how you cd to a shortcut, then we can all agree with you.

A shortcut is analagous to a KDE .desktop file, not to a filesystem symbolic link.

Try again.

Re:If they would have kept their original ideas

[grcumb]

Most of the nice features of NT died either because they came with a performance penalty (e.g. user-mode display drivers)

I remember when Microsoft announced that they were moving graphics back to ring 0 with NT 4.0. The rationale was that they would get much improved performance, which is a perfectly fair conclusion. But when asked about the liability created by this, they basically said, 'Well, if your graphics driver is hosed, you can't use the system anyway, so you'd just as well reboot.'

That wasn't the last straw for me, but it demonstrated with perfect clarity that this was not the OS I wanted on my servers. Here was Microsoft telling me with a straight face that they had no plans to ever provide any decent remote control of the server, that multi-user scenarios were off the table for the foreseeable future, and that system performance was going to be compromised in order to draw windows more quickly, rather than optimised over time in userland.

It was clearly a fundamental technical design decision made by the marketing department, who apparently would be happy to put tits on a bull if it increased market share in the hermaphroditic bestiality demographic.

Within two years of that, I was working exclusively with FOSS on my servers, and have never looked back.

There's a lot of mindless partisanship on Slashdot, but I think it's useful to remember from time to time that many posters here have learned to dislike Microsoft the hard way: through bitter experience of watching marketing continually triumph over technology.