[Python-ideas] Draft PEP for virtualenv in the stdlib

[Tim Delaney]

On 25 October 2011 16:16, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:

> Vinay Sajip wrote:
>
>  Windows XP does not support true symlinks,
>> but only "junctions" aka "reparse points".
>>
>
> Out of curiosity, how far do these fall short of being
> true symlinks? The points I'm aware of are:
>
> * They only work within a volume
> * The GUI doesn't know about them, so it's easy to mistake
>  a link to a folder for an independent copy of it and
>  accidentally trash the original
>
> Are there any others?


Junctions are only available for directories, and they're more akin in
practice to hardlinks than symlinks (although different to both).

Junctions can quite happily work cross-volume. It's hardlinks that only work
within a volume (and you can't make a hardlink to a directory).

Junctions are transparent within a network share i.e. if you a share that
contains a junction, the junction will be traversed correctly. Symlinks do
not work as you would expect when accessed via a network share.

On Win7 and Vista, deleting a junction only deletes the junction. On XP
deleting a junction deletes the contents as well unless Link Shell Extension
<http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/hardlinkshellext.html> is
installed.

Tim Delaney

>
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