Re: Hamm Bug Stamp-Out List for June 25, 1998
> Bdale> If you're working in a multi-machine networked environment,
> Bdale> and are accessing another system using NFS (particularly with
> Bdale> an automounted host map), an absolute link can easily violate
> Bdale> "the principle of least astonishment"... if you are tracking
> Bdale> down a remote machine's filesystems, and cross an absolute
> Bdale> symbolic link, you're back on your local system's filesystem!
> Bdale> That's almost never what you meant, or what you wanted.
> On the other hand, if you are using automount, or AFS, or DFS,
> or even, in some environments, NFS, you may keep all mounts
> under, say, /mnt (eg /usr -> /mnt/i386/usr), in which case, any
> relative links between top level directories loose.
> In this case, a relative symlink also violates the princple of
> least astonishment, and indeed, does not even work.
> I think, on balance, the policy works for the most common
> case.
If we had a symlink-manager along similar lines to the suidmanager then we
could easily solve this for both setups. You could do "symlinkconfig
absolute" or "symlinkconfig relative" to change all the sym-links at one go.
What do you think?
---
I'm an independant computer consultant. I prefer to do Linux administration
and programming. OS/2 programming is also fun, and I do sometimes do NT
programming. I mainly do C++ programming, but would like to get into Java.
This should satisfy the curiosity of those on SERVER-LINUX.
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