Re: Enhancement for file-attributes

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Stefan Monnier <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden
> Date: Sun, 30 Sep 2012 21:16:31 -0400
> 
> > Would it be a good idea to enhance file-attributes by adding one more
> > optional argument to it, which, when non-nil, will cause Emacs call
> > 'stat', not 'lstat', on the argument file name?  This should avoid the
> > need to call file-chase-links when all we want is to get the
> > attributes of the file pointed to by the symlink.
> 
> It would have made a lot of sense originally, but I'm wondering whether
> it's worth the trouble now.

What trouble can this make?  An additional argument whose default is
nil should never cause any trouble.  Am I missing something?

> In how many places would we save the file-chase-links all?  Are
> these places important?

One place is in files.el: after-find-file, when we visit a file that
is a symlink, and backup-buffer.  These are quite frequently used
APIs.