[Samba] Symlink with mklink

[Jeremy Allison]

On Wed, Dec 02, 2015 at 06:07:37PM +0100, Ralph Boehme wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 02, 2015 at 08:39:27AM -0800, Jeremy Allison wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 02, 2015 at 02:30:00PM +0100, Marc JIROU wrote:
> > > 
> > > So no one is interesting in having symbolic link on a samba server ?
> > > 
> > > When i was looking for informations, most of people think that symbolic
> > > link are
> > > reserved to NTFS and can't  exists on a smb server, that why no one ask for.
> > > 
> > > I'm pretty sure a lot of people are waiting for this ( at least people that
> > > use unix system )
> > > but that's just my personnal opinion
> > 
> > Well people use symlinks on Samba servers all the time.
> > But they create and manage them on the UNIX side and
> > the Windows clients are unaware of them.
> > 
> > What advantage does having the clients aware of the
> > link bring ?
> 
> POSIX clients, eg OS X loves symlinks.

Well yes, but we already have the infrastructure
for that (along with all the security protections
that took a while to get right).

Adding Windows client-aware symlink means the same
level of detail needed for a feature that is disabled
by default on Windows and most people are unaware of.

I'm not saying we shouldn't do it - just we need to
be aware of who needs it and the trade-offs.

If a customer pays to have it done I'd be happy to
add it, but we have a lot of other features I think
have higher priority for expanding Samba use right
now (hyperV handle support for example).