Dangling symlink

[arvid at cs.umu.se]

Quoting Warren Togami <wtogami at redhat.com>:

> Not having seen libtorrent code, I'm guessing it passes paths through 
> abstraction layers that are symlink-hostile even before it gets to 
> boost::filesystem.  hydri may have better guidance on how exactly to 
> handle symlinks.

The symlinks would only have to be handled at torrent creation time and storage
initialization time. Since the logical size of the files would be 0, they
wouldn't be touched by any other part of libtorrent.

> * Replicate symlinks exactly as they exist in the source directory, 
> including mtime of the symlink itself.
> * Replicate even if they point at seemingly invalid paths and files. 
> Often they point at ../somethingvalid while you are replicating only the 
> current directory and you want to preserve that seemingly dangling symlink.
> 
> On 06/17/2009 11:35 PM, Atul Aggarwal wrote:
> > nope, it is not recording correct time even for symlink. Even stat() is
> > giving mtime of the file not of the link.

There is a boost.filesystem call called symlink_stat(). However, browsing
through the boost.filesystem reference, it doesn't seem it can do what we want
here unfortunately. You would probably be better off using lstat() directly.

> > I am thinking of submitting the patch for mtime first and work on
> > symlink mtime in adding support for symlink in libtorrent. For symlink,
> > i need to scan almost the whole code of creating torrent file as
> > exceptions are thrown at various levels for dangling symlink and even
> > for symlink pointing to a file, code is not working as expected (as it
> > was not designed to handle symlink in the first place (maybe)).
> >
> > On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 2:20 AM, Warren Togami <wtogami at redhat.com
> > <mailto:wtogami at redhat.com>> wrote:
> >
> >     Does it properly record the mtime of the symlink itself if the
> >     symlink is dangling?
> >
> >     (pointing at a file that doesn't exist)
> >
> >     Warren
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Regards,
> >
> > Atul Aggarwal

-- 
Arvid Norberg