[Bioc-devel] Symbolic links to ExperimentHub files on Windows

[Richard Heery]

Hello all,

My package is failing to build on Windows as one of the functions attempts
to download files from ExperimentHub and then creates a directory with
symbolic links to these files using R.utils::createLink. However, it seems
on Windows that administrative privileges are required to create symbolic
links.

The downloaded files are a HDF5 file and corresponding RDS file for a
HDF5-backed SummarizedExperiment object. The purpose of using symbolic
links to them is so that a directory containing the links can be loaded
using HDF5Array::loadHDF5SummarizedExperiment while leaving the downloaded
files in the ExperimentHub cache.

Without being able to create symbolic links to the files on Windows, the
only alternatives I can think of are to move or copy the files from the
cache into the SummarizedExperiment directory. Neither are ideal solutions
as I would prefer not to move files out of the cache and since the files
may be quite large I would also prefer to avoid copying them.

If anyone has any other suggestions, I would really appreciate it.

Best,

Richard

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