Re: Following symlinks in globstar

[Chet Ramey]

On 1/21/14 6:30 AM, Chris Down wrote:
> On Thu, 1 Aug 2013 13:02:31 +0200, Chris Down wrote:
>> As we're probably all aware, `globstar' follows symlinks when doing
>> recursive traversal. Is it possible to, at some future version, have
>> an option that enables/disables (I guess enables by default for
>> backwards compatibility) following symlinks? This can be quite
>> irritating when trying to traverse procfs filesystems especially.
> 
> It's been nearly half a year since I sent this (as yet unreplied to)
> message, and I still wonder what people's thoughts are on having some
> path to better globstar modularity.
> 
> I still think the best path is to avoid breaking backwards
> compatibility, and to provide a shell option to disable globstar
> traversing symlinks.
> 
> Another option is to break backwards compatibility and do the (arguably)
> more logically expected thing by having ** not traverse symlinks, and
> *** traverse symlinks. That's what a few people I know propose, but I
> think it is quite probably that the symlink-traversing properties of **
> are used in production now.
> 
> I am not so worried about the method used to "fix" globstar -- whether
> we keep backwards compatibility or not -- I am more concerned that we
> have at least *some* way of disabling what many people view as
> undesirable behaviour.

It may or may not be undesirable -- we have no data other than your
original message indicating that it is.  There have been no proposals,
no code contributions, and nothing other than anecdotes to demonstrate
that "many people" view it as a problem.

I interpret this lack of discussion as an indication of priority.  I do
not consider this a priority, and have not to this point, and I have only
looked at it briefly.

Chet
-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/