Re: logical paths

[Eric Blake]

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According to Kartik K. Agaram on 9/10/2006 4:05 PM:
> 
> Does anybody have a comment on how common file operations are on
> externally visible path names? There are ~100 occurrences of calls to
> *stat(), a lot of those would need to change I think. That and a few of
> the ~30 calls to fopen() should get us most of the way there.
> 
> Am I talking through my hat? Or is this a significant enough set of
> changes to make people uncomfortable without some extensive testing?
> Again, I'm not recommending changing default behavior.

I have to admit I appreciate your attitude of "it doesn't work how I would
like, so I'll investigate patching it," but I'm afraid you may be biting
off more than you can chew.  Adding logical behavior to all the coreutils
via an additional option (probably spelled --logical; I doubt you will be
able to consistently use a short option name), in such a manner that it is
consistent between the utilities, well-documented, and shares code between
the utilities, just sounds like a huge task to me, with minimal benefits.
 If you really want to provide such a patch, we will certainly evaluate it
on its merits, but you will probably be on your own writing such a patch.
 And it sounds invasive enough that you would need to assign copyright to
FSF if you ever expected it to be incorporated, if you are able to
convince us that your proposed patch is consistent, and does not impact
performance when your new option is not in use.

Chet Ramey's comments on bug-bash are still pertinent - when worried about
logical vs. physical filename tab-completion in the shell, it is easier to
use the existing shell feature of 'set -o physical' to temporarily force
the shell to physical during the calculation of the filenames to
tab-complete, than it is to teach every utility the difference between
logical and physical.

- --
Life is short - so eat dessert first!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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