Re: Possible bug in NSFileManager

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Saturday, March 9, 2002, at 12:20 AM, e.sammer wrote:

> i've been using NSFileManager to do quite a bit of work. it seems that 
> NSFileManager doesn't handle symlinks properly. i know that 
> linkPath:toPath:handler: is not implemented (as seen in 
> NSFileManager.m), but in copyFile: it does not respect symlinks at all.
> according to the MOSX docs (and in my MOSX tests) copyPath:toPath: 
> should maintain a symlink. i've looked in the docs that talk about the 
> differences between GS and MOSX / OpenStep and there's no mention of 
> this.


I assume you mean in [copyPath:toPath:handler:] (there is no copyFile: 
method) ... it should work there.

As far as I can see from quick look over the code, it should honor the 
documentation to the letter -
but the documentation is not completely unambiguous :-(

Could you provide a small test program to demonstrate your problem.

While the code seems to conform to the letter of the documentation, I'm 
not at all sure it does the
most intuitive/useful thing.  It seems to be preserving the original 
symbolic links - but I'd have
thought it made more sense, if a link pointed to somewhere within the 
path being copied, for the
new symbolic link to be made to the appropriate location within the 
copied structure.

> is there a fundamental problem with symlinks that i'm not aware of?
> i know GS is meant to be portable and some systems do notsupport them,
> but there seems to be half of the implementation in place which leads 
me
> to believe it could just be an oversight.

I guess few people use them, and thus no comparison between actual 
MacOS-X behavior and GNUstep
behavior has been made. I'd be very happy to apply patches to fix this 
to provide the same
real (as opposed to documented) behavior - as long as the real MacOS-X 
behavior is not clearly
a bug of course.