I'm +1 for fixing this, in place, on the current function.

The specification we have here is doing a very very bad thing and needs to be fixed, not slavishly copied forward because someone sometime once made a mistake. 

The current behavior grievously violates the expectations of anyone who would be in a situation to go and reach for it and has any prior experience with any other such tool.

-Edward



On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 11:14 AM, Malcolm Wallace <malcolm.wallace@me.com> wrote:

On 6 Jan 2015, at 14:59, Bardur Arantsson wrote:

> On 2015-01-06 14:57, Mike Meyer wrote:
>> On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 7:48 AM, Johan Tibell <johan.tibell@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> This is not a bugfix. A bug is failing to follow the functions
>>> specification, which *does* include following symlinks.
>>>
>>
>> It's a bug in the design, not the code.

> Because *nobody* wants to follow symlinks when doing "rm -rf". Even if
> they think they do, they *really* don't.

I agree 100%.  Even time I use this function, I worry briefly about whether it follows symlinks, then think to myself "no, no-one would be so stupid to implement that deliberately in a publically available API".  So it was a real shock to discover in this thread that I was wrong, and furthermore that the function is documented as doing the wrong thing.  We should fix both spec and implementation, as soon as possible.

Regards,
    Malcolm
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