Wow. As a side note, this will also enable real symlinks in cygwin. There is already a setting CYGWIN=winsymlinks:native, but this doesn't work because you needed the rights to create native symlinks, and you usually don't run cygwin elevated.
(Actually, the situation was pretty messed up. There was a group policy that allowed regular (non-admin) users to create symlinks, but this never really worked, since UAC made processed drop a bunch of rights including symlink creation. So you needed a) either an admin account or a regular account, with the policy set, on Win Pro, and b) you needed to request elevation (which is subtly different from Run As Administrator) or disable UAC (which is dangerous and borks Metro apps in Windows >= 8).)
I'm so so glad they fixed this. Next step: Proper GUI for this in Explorer (and also for extended attributes, etc.).
(Actually, the situation was pretty messed up. There was a group policy that allowed regular (non-admin) users to create symlinks, but this never really worked, since UAC made processed drop a bunch of rights including symlink creation. So you needed a) either an admin account or a regular account, with the policy set, on Win Pro, and b) you needed to request elevation (which is subtly different from Run As Administrator) or disable UAC (which is dangerous and borks Metro apps in Windows >= 8).)
I'm so so glad they fixed this. Next step: Proper GUI for this in Explorer (and also for extended attributes, etc.).