Useage of symlinks makes running the benchmarks on windows a PITA.

[AndreasPK]

Basically symlink support on windows is just not there yet.
See https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/issues/16528 for more details.

Symlinks were introduced in #626

[treeowl]

@phadej, since you were just working on this, do you think you could take a look?

[phadej]

It works on my recent Windows 10 machine. (Git 2.21)

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See https://github.com/git-for-windows/git/wiki/Symbolic-Links

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Cannot help beyond that.

[AndreasPK]

It doesn't work "out of the box" for me under msys. (Or under git-bash for that matter).

git version 2.21.0

While it annoys me greatly personally, I'm also sure it will lead to more issues in the future.

It's my understanding that:

• It might fail because of lack of admin rights/developer mode.
• It might fail if environment variables are not set properly.
• It might fail if user policies are not set properly.
• It might fail if git config settings are not set properly.
• It might fail because msys-git likes to clone repos with a default config that disables symlinks.

It probably also fails on windows7. But that seems acceptable.

There are ways to get around all of these except the last one described here. But with the last bullet point remaining it's still a PITA.

I can't imagine I'm the last person to run into issues with symlinks on windows either. So I don't think they are worth it (yet) just for a slightly better folder structure.

Anyway if the maintainers feel differently that's fine by me. I just wanted to raise the issue that symlinks on windows are not yet a a "can expect it to work everywhere, everytime" thing.

[phadej]

I'm sorry, but I cannot help here. If @treeowl wants to revert my patch, I won't be offended.

[treeowl]

That was a pretty important patch! I'd very much rather not. I know nothing about Windows, so I'm not sure how I can help. @AndreasPK, do you have a suggestion?

[AndreasPK]

Ideally I still think we shouldn't use symlinks (yet) but I'm not willing to put in the effort so I don't see that happen.

I think it's an ok solution if we just put the info on how to get symlinks to work under the various windows environments into a README, maybe under the tests directory.

[sjakobi]

I think it's an ok solution if we just put the info on how to get symlinks to work under the various windows environments into a README, maybe under the tests directory.

@AndreasPK Since you seem to have that info, could you document it?

[treeowl]

Would it be possible to use a non-simple build for containers-tests on Windows that copies the files over from containers? I know nothing about Windows and only a little about Cabal.