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  • Ulrich Drepper's avatar
    [PATCH] flags parameter for linkat · c04030e1
    Ulrich Drepper authored
    
    
    I'm currently at the POSIX meeting and one thing covered was the
    incompatibility of Linux's link() with the POSIX definition.  The name.
    Linux does not follow symlinks, POSIX requires it does.
    
    Even if 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?
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarUlrich Drepper <drepper@redhat.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarRalf Baechle <ralf@linux-mips.org>
    Cc: Heiko Carstens <heiko.carstens@de.ibm.com>
    Cc: Martin Schwidefsky <schwidefsky@de.ibm.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
    c04030e1