[IVY-1165] During retreieve: Creation of symlinks problematic in Windows with Cygwin 1.7

• Type: Bug
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 2.1.0-RC2
• Fix Version/s: 2.2.0-RC1

Environment

Windows 7 64 bit
Cygwin 1.7
Cygwin's bin directory on PATH

• Assignee: Maarten Coene
• Reporter: John Brandy
• Created: 27/Jan/10 21:59
• Updated: 07/May/10 20:13
• Resolved: 03/Feb/10 21:06

Description

On Windows with the Cygwin 1.7 bin directory on the PATH, Ivy will create a ~1kb "symlink" file instead of copying the jar to the ivylib directory. This causes the retrieve process to fail.

As described in IVY-353, the creation of symlinks with cygwin was problematic for Windows systems. The fix as I understand it was to attempt to create a symlink, if that failed (the expected file did not exist) then copy the jar. That worked with the default configuration of Cygwin 1.5 which attempted to create Windows link (file.lnk) files. However as of 1.7 cygwin does not default to that behavior anymore and now Ivy fails in this case.

For either version, if cygwin's environment option "winsymlinks" is turned to off – which 1.7 defaults to – then Ivy won't successfully retrieve due to thinking that the creation of a symlink was successful.