I'm working on adding support for Windows' symlinks in std.file. std.file.symlink's augmentation is straightforward, but testing it is not as easy. The reason is because, normally, one must confer escalated privileges to the executable making the link via CreateSymbolicLink[A|W]. This may be obviated, in Windows 10 at least, by enabling "Developer mode" and passing a flag to the aforementioned function.

Thus, consider what I have right now:

auto flags = /* Default flags */;
version (StdUnittest)
{
	flags |= SYMBOLIC_LINK_FLAG_ALLOW_UNPRIVILEGED_CREATE;
}

By doing this, running tests shouldn't require administrator's rights, assuming "Developer mode" is enabled. However, are the Windows CI machines set up for this? Should there be a special case at all?

The final concern relates to Phobos defining system_directory and system_file for Posix and Android. These two constants are used in testing some of std.file's functionality. For Windows, a testing directory could be %temp% and the testing file could be created in that directory. If my changes were approved, the file would only have to be created twice throughout std.file's tests. However, I'd like to know some alternatives and potential issues to/with this!