2009/387 [Pathname Reparse Points]

[Joerg Schilling]

"Garrett D'Amore" <gdamore at sun.com> wrote:

> This sounds reasonable, and is not like the case of AFS which uses 
> special tokens in symbolic links that can expand to other things.
>
> I'm a bit concerned about potential effects on applications, it *seems* 
> like this is done in a manner that is safe, but there are a few items:
>
>     * are applications consistent in their use of pathconf/fpathconf to 
> get filesystem limits
>     * presumably archivers and such are not expected to traverse these?  
> (they get handled like an ordinary symbolic link)
>     * what happens when the referral is archived and then reextracted?  
> (is the attribute lost?)
>     * as a nit, its not truly file system independent, since it relies 
> on symbolic links (not all filesystems support
>     symlinks, though admittedly the ones of interest to this case all do)

I expect to see a lof of applications that asume that SYMLINK_MAX is identical
to PATH_MAX. This is really hard to review.

Unless SYMLINK_MAX is set to the maximum value on the system, I asume to see
many applications that may fail because they do not call pathconf().

The case does not introduce a trivial anhancement.

Jörg

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