Re: What Does the Symlinks Command do?

Will McDonald <wmcdonald@xxxxxxxxx> · Thu, 5 Dec 2024 22:35:39 +0000

On Thu, 5 Dec 2024 at 21:29, Stephen Morris <steve.morris.au@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

  I might be skating on thin ice here, but here goes, as a developer,
    and the way I write programs to the level of user friendliness
    required where I work, in my view what is happening is badly written
    code, to use terminology that is common where I work, it should not
    be producing the extra guf that is incidental to what it has been
    asked to do, which is delete dangling symlinks. 

I don't think you're on thin ice, but software works the way it works.

This list is for the Fedora distro. The Fedora distro is a 
collection of lots of upstream projects, packaged in a specific way.  The project  will have a degree of 
influence in certain behaviours or package selections, but probably not 
at the level of granularity where someone thinking a specific binary 
should behave differently will change things?

The symlinks package itself looks pretty moribund.

[wmcdonald@fedora ~ ]$ rpm -qf `which symlinks`
symlinks-1.7-10.fc40.x86_64
[wmcdonald@fedora ~ ]$ rpm -qi symlinks 
Name        : symlinks
Packager    : Fedora Project
Vendor      : Fedora Project
URL         : http://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/utils/file/
Bug URL     : https://bugz.fedoraproject.org/symlinks
<some output snipped>

[wmcdonald@fedora ~ ]$ rpm -q --changelog symlinks
* Sat Jan 27 2024 Fedora Release Engineering <releng@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> - 1.7-10
- Rebuilt for https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_40_Mass_Rebuild

* Sat Jul 22 2023 Fedora Release Engineering <releng@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> - 1.7-9
- Rebuilt for https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_39_Mass_Rebuild

* Sat Jan 21 2023 Fedora Release Engineering <releng@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> - 1.7-8
- Rebuilt for https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_38_Mass_Rebuild

* Sat Jul 23 2022 Fedora Release Engineering <releng@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> - 1.7-7
- Rebuilt for https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_37_Mass_Rebuild

The archive it appears to be packaged from states https://www.ibiblio.org/software/linux/

I guess, as a developer, if you wanted to improve it, you could move the archive sources to an active repo, start improving it with what you want and petition to see if it could be actively updated again? (I have zero idea of the politics behind this, but it's open source software.)

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