[tex-live] Copying symbolic links to Windows

Robin Fairbairns Robin.Fairbairns at cl.cam.ac.uk
Fri Aug 24 12:18:56 CEST 2007


Siep Kroonenberg <siepo at cybercomm.nl> wrote:

> Are you sure? A quick Google search suggested that before Vista
> symlinks or junctions were available only for directories, and hard
> links for files.
> 
> sysinternals.com has tools for manipulating junctions; see under
> File & Disk Utilities.
> 
> By the way. It makes me mad that Microsoft bitches about their
> intellectual property whereas they keep adopting more Unix features,
> implicitly admitting that all along Unix was right and they were
> wrong. So their intellectual property mainly cover botched solutions
> to problems that were already solved right in Unix. Sorry for the
> rant.

iirc, symlinks were covered by an at&t patent, which m$
couldn't/wouldn't negotiate around.

if i'm right, the existence of symlinks in vista would indicate a patent
expiry rather than any admission of guilt.

m$ are guilty as hell, in the patent arena, themselves -- they patent
the most preposterous things, all common (published) knowledge, and rely
on the feebleness of the patent review system for software to get their
patents accepted.

however, this case is probably one of the biter bit...

robin



More information about the tex-live mailing list