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

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Message #5 received at submit <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
To: Emacs bug reports and feature requests <bug-gnu-emacs <at> gnu.org>
Cc: Michael Albinus <michael.albinus <at> gmx.de>
Subject: Emacs quietly munges symlink contents
Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2017 03:28:04 -0700

[Message part 1 (text/plain, inline)]

Tags: patch

The attached patch fixes some Emacs behavior that disagrees with the 
documentation.  Although the user manual says that make-symbolic-link "does
not expand the argument TARGET", Emacs expands leading "~" in the target. Also, 
file-symlink-p quietly munges symlink contents if they appear to be a Tramp file 
name. This behavior makes it impossible to write Emacs code that deals with 
arbitrary local symbolic links, and Emacs mishandles copying of some symlinks 
for this reason. At the operating system level, symlink targets are merely 
strings, and are not file names that are interpreted (any interpretation occurs 
later, only when the symlinks are followed), and Emacs should be consistent with 
that.

It strikes me that a similar change probably needs to be made to Tramp, so that 
remote symlinks also can be arbitrary strings too. However, that's outside my 
expertise so this patch affects only local symlink contents.

[0001-Do-not-munge-contents-of-local-symbolic-links.patch (text/x-patch, attachment)]

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