PS. This is about more than just learnability for newbies -- this issue tripped me up after 18 years of using Linux as a desktop and/or dev environment, because I ran into the rare case where a program (in this case https://github.com/bbuhrow/yafu/) needed a separate working directory for each instance and was useful to run multiple instances of in parallel (in this case, factoring multiple different composites for https://factordb.com/ ).
Sincerely, Chris Hennick On Sun, Sep 14, 2025 at 2:15 AM Chris <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 >> >
