[Lazarus] Absolute paths on different platforms

[Howard Page-Clark]

On 27/6/11 8:12, Marco van de Voort wrote:

>> Some of these features have been added only after W2K, as Mark
>> annotated. It may be for compatibility reasons, or not-updated Explorer
>> behaviour, when links and shortcuts still are stored in the old-fashion way.
>
> The tipping point is Vista, not XP afaik.
>
XP (NTFS 5.0 and higher) does support Junctions (a folder-only type of 
symlink). However they are unuseable on XP (unless you install a shell 
extension), because XP's Explorer does not handle them correctly. So few 
XP users are aware of Junction functionality.

Vista and Win7 have native Explorer support for Junctions as well as 
true POSIX-like symlink behaviour for files as well as folders. Though 
GUI access needs a shell extension, there is the command-line utility 
mklink, which confusingly (why does M$ do this?) has Source and Target 
parameters the opposite way round from what Linux experience leads you 
to expect.