Re: Tramp: how to handle make-symbolic-link?

[Stefan Monnier]

>     So the LINKNAME argument does not look like a Tramp filename.  But
>     what if the target of the symbolic link is an absolute filename?
>     Which of the two kinds of calls do we expect?
> 
>     (make-symbolic-link "/address@hidden:/name/of/file" 
> "/address@hidden:/path/to/target")
>     (make-symbolic-link "/address@hidden:/name/of/file" "/path/to/target")
> 
> I disagree with the view that the link target is just a string.
> It is meant to be a file name.
> 
> Assuming that symlinks in the remote file system can only point to
> that same remote file system, the former request is possible, and the
> latter should get an error because there is no way to make a link to
> the local machine's disk.

make-symbolic-link should not prevent you from creating to a link
to a file that doesn't exist.  Especially since you can pretty much
never tell whether the file will ever exist or not.

Maybe my point of view is too posix-centric, but I really would be
annoyed if eshell prevented me from creating symlinks just on the
basis that Emacs thinks the target is "invalid".  I use invalid
targets all the time (g.e. because the filesystem is currently
mounted at a different location than the "final" one, or because
I want to store non-filenames and have `ls -l' show me that data
or because I know that the data is small and that my filesystem
stores such data more efficiently if I use symlinks rather than
files, ...).
And I don't think my usage pattern is unique.


        Stefan