Proposal: removeDirectoryRecursive should not follow symlinks

[Gabriel Gonzalez]

I think it's safer to remove the old function altogether (perhaps after 
one deprecation cycle) and provide a new one under a different name, 
rather than modify it in place.

Modifying it in place risks the behavior that others mentioned where 
your program is unsafe to compile against older library versions. Yes, 
the user could explicitly enforce that by putting a lower bound on the 
library, but most users won't even realize that they need to do that.


On 1/6/15, 11:37 AM, Edward Kmett wrote:
> 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 <mailto: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 <mailto: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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