#10427: cloning is broken on Solaris
------------------------------+---------------------------------------------
Reporter: jhpalmieri | Owner: drkirkby
Type: defect | Status: positive_review
Priority: minor | Milestone: sage-4.6.1
Component: solaris | Keywords: Solaris ln -snf posix symbolic
link dereference
Author: John Palmieri | Upstream: N/A
Reviewer: Leif Leonhardy | Merged:
Work_issues: |
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Changes (by leif):
* status: needs_review => positive_review
Comment:
Replying to [comment:8 jhpalmieri]:
> Replying to [comment:5 leif]:
> > Patch in principle looks good to me; just one question: Is the "blank"
`echo` line at the beginning intentional?
>
> Not really, I just copied the whole block of code from somewhere else,
although if there is a problem like this with the script, having a blank
line before the error message can make it stand out more, especially if it
comes after many other lines of output.
In that case, I would have also prepended "`Error: `", and perhaps
redirected the output to `stderr` (`>&2`). ;-)
(The "standard" phrase ''Maybe run sage -sh?'' is missing, but I
appreciate that. :) )
[[BR]]
> > The comment(s) regarding `ln -snf` is a bit misleading, since we never
want to delete (or overwrite) the target, which is `sage-<branch>`, but
the link to it, `sage`.
>
> Oh, I see, on some platforms (e.g. OS X and Solaris), the man page for
ln refers to the link as the "target" and the existing file being linked
as the "source", while on other platforms (e.g. at least some linux
platforms), the existing file is called the "target" and the link is
called "LINK NAME". Since I've been looking at the Solaris man page when
dealing with this, that terminology must have stuck in my head. So the
problem is that the terminology in the man pages wildly inconsistent, and
so the word "target" should be avoided completely.
POSIX talks about ''source '''file(s)''''', a ''target '''file''''' or
''target '''directory''''' (like also GNU does), and ''destination
paths''.
(In addition, "unlinking" was ambiguous as in the context of UNIX,
"unlink" is used synonymously for "remove", since that actually refers to
directory entries, not the files themselves; a file only gets deleted if
there are no more directory entries referring to it, i.e. its link count
reaches zero.)
The current formulation should be clear to everyone, though here both
arguments are [symbolic links to] directories, where (more) ambiguity
occurs.
--
Ticket URL: <http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/10427#comment:10>
Sage <http://www.sagemath.org>
Sage: Creating a Viable Open Source Alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica,
and MATLAB
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