posted on Tuesday, November 28, 2006 4:01 PM
by
Jonathan Hodgson
Symbolics links in Vista
A new but low-level addition to Vista is the support for
symbolic links in the file system. These are more than the previous junction points.
So why might you want this? Well, alot of *nix-based operating systems have grown up using the technology to give a level of indirection and thus make dependencies and deployment easier.
For example, you could create a symlink to version 1.0 of your application that you tell users to run your application from - but 1.0 really points to 1.0.4558 of your application.
Got a new release, just update the symlink to the new version and the clients don't know anything. Much better option than the usual copying new versions over the existing code.
Take this further and if you have multiple subprojects that you need to release as a whole, you can symlink dev, qa, prod to 2.0, 1.1, 1.0 and a turnover release is just switching the symlink and rollback the reverse.
Junfeng Zhang explains how to set them up via the command line and Yves Dolce uses them for
shortcuts to common directories.