Re: [PATCH] flags parameter for linkat

[Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>]

On Thu, Feb 23, 2006 at 09:10:22AM -0500, Ulrich Drepper wrote:
> I'm currently at the POSIX meeting and one thing covered was the
> incompatibility of Linux's link() with the POSIX definition.  The
> difference is the treatment of symbolic links in the destination
> name.  Linux does not follow symlinks, POSIX requires it does.
> 
> Even somebody thinks this is a good default behavior we cannot
> change this because it would break the ABI.  But the fact remains
> that some application might want this behavior.
> 
> We have one chance to help implementing this without breaking the
> behavior.  For this we could use the new linkat interface which
> would need a new flags parameter.  If the new parameter is
> AT_SYMLINK_FOLLOW the new behavior could be invoked.
> 
> I do not want to introduce such a patch now.  But we could add the
> parameter now, just don't use it.  The patch below would do this.
> Can we get this late patch applied before the release more or less
> fixes the syscall API?

Please stop adding these crappy flags argument everywhere, they're also
creaping like a cancer through the other *at stuff.  Just make linkat
do the righ thing per posix spec for link, and then you can implement
a posix link based on it in glibc if the user compiles with XOPEN_SOURCE
or whatever.