GNU bug report logs - #28156
Emacs quietly munges symlink contents

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From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>
To: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
Cc: p.stephani2 <at> gmail.com, michael.albinus <at> gmx.de, 28156 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#28156: Emacs quietly munges symlink contents
Date: Mon, 21 Aug 2017 05:34:14 +0300

> Cc: michael.albinus <at> gmx.de, p.stephani2 <at> gmail.com, 28156 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
> From: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
> Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2017 14:31:40 -0700
> 
> This instance of the problem occurs because rename-file calls 
> make-symbolic-link, and make-symbolic-link silently alters the link target. The 
> real problem here is with make-symbolic-link: the rename-file bug is just a symptom.

Then you want a way of invoking make-symbolic-link non-interactively
that doesn't expand "~", AFAIU.  No need to affect its interactive
invocation.

> >> Here, rename-file quietly expands the symlink contents, which is a bug. As far
> >> as I can see, one cannot work around the bug by using Tramp quoting; for
> >> example, (rename-file "/:symlink" "/:/tmp/symlink") does the same thing that
> >> (rename-file "symlink" "/tmp/symlink") does.
> > 
> > But AFAIU, file-symlink-p can return a quoted name if its argument is
> > quoted.
> 
> I don't know what you mean by "quoted".

I mean this:

  (file-symlink-p "/:/tmp/symlink")

There's special code in file-symlink-p to support this and return a
quoted name of the symlink target.  For some reason, you wanted to
remove that code.

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