Proposal: removeDirectoryRecursive should not follow symlinks

[Edward Kmett]

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 at 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 at 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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