> Presumably, people with blanket write privs and people responsible for > the build machinery.
Yup, that's them. I did a little historical digging on this item, and the original trigger was http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2005-05/msg00280.html where Paolo needed to switch from symlinks to hardlinks for toplevel bootstrapping. So, I think we've confused the issue enough that we may be making bad decisions (or at least *I* am confused and may make bad decisions ;). Paolo, could you go back and think about the bootstrapping problem from MinGW's perspective? Danny, could you summarize which build features MinGW supports? (I assume cp and $(SHELL) but not symlinks, hardlinks, or #!). DJGPP and Cygwin shouldn't be a problem here; they both support symlinks and #! but I don't think they support hardlinks.