Isn't it better to surprise users who know what they're doing with a warning, than to surprise users who *don't* know what they're doing with the lack of one?
On Sat, Sep 13, 2025 at 11:54 PM Collin Funk <[email protected]> wrote: > Paul Eggert <[email protected]> writes: > > > On 2025-09-13 03:16, Chris wrote: > >> It seems to me it should be easy enough to alert users to this gotcha by > >> printing a warning to stderr when creating a symlink > > > > I dunno, that gotcha has been present in Unix and Linux for nearly 50 > > years now, and lots of people are used to the gotcha would plausibly > > object to a warning. > > FWIW, relative symbolic links and dangling symlinks are covered in the > manual. You can read it online [1], or using the following command in > your terminal: > > $ info '(coreutils) ln invocation' > > I agree that it probably is a point of confusion for someones first > encountering symbolic links, but it is a perfectly valid use of them. So > I think emitting a warning there would cause some complaints. > > New warnings tend to surprise people. I'm sure Paul remembers the many > long threads about the warning that 'egrep' and 'fgrep' are obsolete. :) > > Collin > > [1] > https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/ln-invocation.html#ln-invocation >
