Re: Remove S_IFLNK (was: windows build failure)

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2011 13:28:24 -0800
> From: Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>
> CC: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> > If all we need is define 2 always-fail functions for w32 and for
> > MS-DOS, let's just do that on src/w32.c and src/msdos.c
> 
> That sounds fine, and that can be combined with this approach, since
> the w32 and DOS ports supply their own hand-built config.h files.
> 
> However, we should also work around the known bugs with lstat etc. on
> non-Windows platforms, which the Gnulib code handles.  These have to
> do with file names that have trailing slashes; some Unixish hosts
> incorrectly treat "foo/" as a symbolic link, for example, even when
> it's a directory or is nonexistent, if "foo" happens to be a symlink.

I'd say if we didn't hear about these problems until now, they are not
important enough to justify such heavyweight changes and added
complexity with remapping functions, replacing them, etc.

However, if Stefan and Chong are okay with this, so be it.

> > Imagine:
> >
> >    User: M-x make-symbolic-link RET foo RET bar RET
> >    Emacs: File bar already exists; make it a link anyway?
> >    User: yes RET
> >    Emacs: Making symbolic link: Function not implemented
> >    User: :-( why *&^%$#@! didn't you tell me that to begin with??
> 
> This scenario already occurs in the mainstream code.  If I am running
> Emacs on a GNU/Linux host, using files on a file server that does not
> support symbolic links, I will already see behavior like that.  It's
> more consistent if Emacs's behavior is similar on Windows.

I could quote Emerson about foolish consistency here (a Posix host
would have hard time knowing in advance that the call will fail,
whereas a Windows host doesn't have that problem), but again, if I'm
the only one who cares about this, I give up.

> Here's the revised patch (full version attached).

Thanks.  When you decide to merge it, please give me a day or two to
add the stub functions for Windows and DOS, so that when you commit,
these two ports will still build.