What's up with the symlinks in the 7.0-RC2 ISO images?

[Oliver Fromme]

deeptech71 at gmail.com wrote:
 > Oliver Fromme wrote:
 > > Well, someone might want to look at the "doc" CD on Windows
 > > (e.g if he's offline and needs to loo at the docs before
 > > installing FreeBSD).
 > 
 > Or maybe someone might want to make a FreeBSD-7.0-RC2 DVD,
 > and a FreeBSD installation is too far away...

The symlinks don't prevent him from doing that.

 > > However:
 > > 
 > >  - The symlinks aren't required to read the docs.  They're
 > >    only for convenience.
 > 
 > Symlinks also aren't required for anything else: hard links work fine, 
 > and are more compatible.

You can't make hardlinks to directories.

 > >  - All the ISO images -- including the doc one -- are built
 > >    with MS-Joliet extensions (in addition to RockRidge), so
 > >    long file names etc. work fine on Windows, too.
 > 
 > Actually, long file names etc. work fine on Windows without the 
 > MS-Joliet extensions and with ISO level 2 or 3

Yeah, up to 31 characters, which isn't really long, and you
still have a bunch of other restrictions, e.g. only upper-
case letters, digits and underscore are allowed, no leading
dots, there's a limit to the directory depth, and so on.

So you still need MS-Joliet extensions.

 > If Windows-readability is a higher priority than DOS-readability 
 > (definitely!), then lose the symlinks.

The symlinks don't hurt Windows-readability at all.
There's nothing that needs to be fixed.

Best regards
   Oliver

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