symlink fs_abilities (was Re: [rdiff-backup-users] [PATCH] Log symlink creation)

[Gordon Rowell]

Andrew Ferguson wrote:

> It certainly seems to:
> -- excerpt from a mirror_metadata --
> File SymlinkTest
>  Type sym
>  SymData a.out
>  Uid 0
>  Uname root
>  Gid 80
>  Gname admin
>  Permissions 493
> -- end excerpt --
>  

Yep - I can confirm that this does indeed happen when backing up to a 
CIFS filesystem. However, the symlink operation fails and throws an 
error which is logged (courtesy of a caught OSError):

Thu Nov 16 14:28:13 2006  Exception '[Errno 1] Operation not permitted' 
raised of class 'exceptions.OSError':
 File "/usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/rdiff_backup/robust.py", line 
32, in check_common_error
   try: return function(*args)
 File "/usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/rdiff_backup/rpath.py", line 
107, in copy
   rpout.symlink(rpin.readlink())
 File "/usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/rdiff_backup/rpath.py", line 
888, in symlink
   self.conn.os.symlink(linktext, self.path)

Thu Nov 16 14:28:13 2006  SpecialFileError etc/smbpasswd [Errno 1] 
Operation not permitted

So, for cleanliness we should add symlinks as a capability in 
fs_abilities so that we don't throw/log the error on filesystems which 
do not support symlinks. I'll have a look at that.

Thanks,

Gordon