Re: dired-make-relative-symlink

[Pierre Lorenzon]

Hi,

Here is a very compact and short implementation

(defun dired-make-relative-symlink (file1 file2 &optional ok-if-already-exists)
  "Make a symbolic link (pointing to FILE1) in FILE2.
The link is relative (if possible), for example

    \"/vol/tex/bin/foo\" \"/vol/local/bin/foo\"

results in

    \"../../tex/bin/foo\" \"/vol/local/bin/foo\""
  (interactive "FRelSymLink: \nFRelSymLink %s: \np")
  (let ((file1 (expand-file-name file1))
        (file2 (expand-file-name file2)))
    (make-symbolic-link (directory-file-name
                         (file-relative-name file1
                                             (file-name-directory
                                              file2)))
                        file2 ok-if-already-exists)))

I did not yet notice bugs but maybe there are some !

If you think it is accurate to replace the code in dired-x.el
fell free to do it !

Regards

Pierre


From: Pierre Lorenzon <devel@pollock-nageoire.net>
Subject: dired-make-relative-symlink
Date: Tue, 04 Jul 2017 16:10:38 +0200 (CEST)

> 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I wonder why the function dired-make-relative-symlink
> recalculate the relative name of the file instead of using
> file-relative-name of the files.el library.
> 
> Making a few tests it seems that both codes produce the same
> result. Anyway maybe these tests are not torturing the code
> enough.
> 
> files.el library seems to be very old and it looks strange to
> me that when dired-x.el was developped files.el was not known.
> 
> I did not report that as a bug since it is not a bug but I
> think that a system is more maintainable when code is not
> duplicated.
> 
> Regards
> 
> PS/ Sory if I did not notice an evident reason for which the
> code is so !
>