id,summary,reporter,owner,description,type,status,milestone,component,version,severity,resolution,keywords,cc
4153,Add symlink support for bjam on Windows,Sorin Sbarnea <sorin.sbarnea@…>,Vladimir Prus,"Currently bjam does not supports symlinks under Windows and it does copy the files instead. This is doubling the required disk space for boost libraries (overhead of ~1.4GB).

Windows does supports several types of symlinks and hardlinks.

The problem is that there are several limitations that require to make a wise decision regarding implementation:

NT symlinks are limited to 32 per path so we cannot use them for libraries.

Instead we can create hardlinks because they do not have this limitation.

Now regarding hardlinks: 
* NTFS is required (not FAT32 support but this shouldn't be a real limitation in 2010). The same limitation would apply if you have FAT32 on Linux.
* Hardlink can be created using two options: fsutil hardlink create (XP+, but requires Admin rights), or mklink /H (Vista+, requires 'Create symbolic link' privilege that by default is assigned to Administrators group.)

I could easily patch symlink.jab file to use mklink or fsutil but I don't know if the above limitation are a blocking issue for accepting the patch. If this is true what would be the requirements for adding this feature to bjam?

I'm not sure if I can check the current partition type and privileges using jam but I could easily check if mklink fails and fallback to copy.

",Bugs,new,Boost 1.43.0,build,Boost 1.42.0,Problem,,symlink bjam,macke@…