Re: Enhancement for file-attributes

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Stefan Monnier <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden
> Date: Mon, 01 Oct 2012 10:31:58 -0400
> 
> >> 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.
> 
> So you're saying it's important because it can impose
> a noticeable overhead in those cases?  Do we have actual numbers?

No, I don't, at least not on Posix systems.  On MS-Windows, chasing
links is expensive, but that might be because the equivalent of
'readlink' is slower than on Posix.

> It seems that both operations do so many other things that it might be
> lost in the noise.

Maybe so, but it's a boon to the programmer to pass one more argument
instead of invoking another API, I think.  And I see no danger in the
change of the interface.