Build Q: Anyone know why we have hard links in our gaia (windows) build process?

[Andrew Sutherland]

In https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=971803 we are getting
intermittent recursive copy failures that look like this:
cp: will not create hard link
`../../build_stage/camera/shared/style/drawer/images/ui' to directory
`../../build_stage/camera/shared/js/device_storage'

This is apparently a somewhat expected outcome of MozillaBuild (using a
really old version of cp
(https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Simple_Firefox_build/Windows_Firefox_build#MozillaBuild
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=971803#c10) and it being
hard to update those things because you update one thing and the ripple
effects turn out even worse.

Assuming the hard link error is not a lie, does anyone have any ideas
about where the hard links are coming from/how to stop them? A cursory
audit of gaia suggests it's not really gaia itself making this happen.

Thanks,
Andrew

[John Ford]

The coreutils included in mozilla-build are broken in many ways. I started a reimplementation of rm in Win32 native functions that has since been greatly improved on by Vlad and is located here: https://github.com/vvuk/winrm

The issue with the rm command was, if I recall correctly, that the inode emulation had a bug in a hashing function that caused collisions. The cp command could also have a problem in the posix emulation layer, maybe even completely unrelated to hard links. It might not be much work to reimplement cp in the same fashion as rm.

John

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