Panic on windows

[Bios-Marcel]

Calls to os.Symlink can error on windows, due to lack of "certain permissions". Can we just replace this with hardlinking? If so, only for Windows, or for all systems?

[gtramontina]

If Windows supports hardlinks, perhaps switching everything to hardlinks would make sense. Any drawbacks you can think of?

I'll go ahead and setup a GHA runner with Windows…

[Bios-Marcel]

Well, I am not very deep in the matter, but as long as files end up on the same drive (partition), hardlinks are not an issue afaik. Not sure if we can make sure that this is a given. It's possible we need to reconsider where to save the temporary data. If I remember correctly, it uses the systems / users temp folder?

According to the underlying docs of TempDir() string, it uses the first match of the environment variables %TMP%, %TEMP%, %USERPROFILE%. As these are global environment variables, they shouldn't be per drive and therefore can be across drives.

So, what we could do, is to create a local .tmp-ooze and make sure we clean it up once we are done? If this is an acceptable trade-off for you, I don't see an issue.

[Bios-Marcel]

I tested the hardlinks and it seems to work just fine on windows. I also can't think of any risks. The only difference would be, that keeping the tempfiles would keep the real files accessible, as hardlinked data is kept until the last hardlink has been deleted. This isn't necessarily be a problem, but just something to be aware of.