Windows

[obazoud]

Hello,

Try to test knife-block on windows under git-bash and I got the following errors:

• ERROR: NotImplementedError: symlink() function is unimplemented on this machine - https://github.com/greenandsecure/knife-block/blob/master/lib/chef/knife/block.rb#L77
• ERROR: NotImplementedError: readlink() function is unimplemented on this machine - https://github.com/greenandsecure/knife-block/blob/master/lib/chef/knife/block.rb#L125
• Same with unlink https://github.com/greenandsecure/knife-block/blob/master/lib/chef/knife/block.rb#L175
  ...

Thanks.

[proffalken]

Wow, people are using this on Windows now? That wasn't in the original use case! :)

Thanks for logging this, I don't quite know how to handle it to be honest as I only run Linux and it seems that all this linking is peculiar to unix-like platforms.

If you can find out how to fix it and submit a patch that works on Windows and Linux, I'd be more than happy to accept it :)

[solarce]

I can't say this'll be a high priority, as it wasn't built to support Windows originally, and I'm taxed with trying to get master in working order with Chef 12, ChefDK, and Ruby 2.2, but I setup https://ci.appveyor.com/project/solarce/knife-block and will try to play with it more this week and see about getting a Windows build going, which should help determine what needs to be fixed to make it support Windows in some fashion.

[spuder]

+1
I currently am on a mac, but have some windows fanatic coworkers who will want this once we get the second chef server running.

[benvaljean]

Symbolic links are not implemented that way with Windows and this tool fundamentally uses symbolic links. There is however a tool for Windows called mklink. It would be possible to factor the code to call the 3rd-party programme if Windows is detected: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21511347/how-to-create-a-symlink-on-windows-via-ruby

The question is though, do we want to do this? Would it compromise the code-base? It is a shame to rule out an entire platform though.

Another option would be to not use symlinks and call knife with the -c argument, but that is potentially another discussion entirely.

[james-s-nduka]

That's a shame. Bit of advice though, it should be made it clear in the README that this gem doesn't support Windows.

[benvaljean]

@james-s-nduka There is a PR here #18 that addresses the issue. I have not got around to testing it though as I do not use Windows much. If you can try and test it I can merge it if it works OK and we will have windows support.

[proffalken]

@james-s-nduka that's a fair point, if I get five minutes I'll update the README.

Originally, this was just a tool for helping me whilst contracting to switch between customers, then it started being used by a few Linux engineers at one of my customers, then it snowballed in to this!

:)