Re: What Does the Symlinks Command do?

Will McDonald <wmcdonald@xxxxxxxxx> · Fri, 6 Dec 2024 23:52:11 +0000

On Fri, 6 Dec 2024 at 23:39, Stephen Morris <steve.morris.au@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

    On 6/12/24 09:35, Will McDonald wrote:

          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.

The symlinks package itself looks pretty moribund. 
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.)

    I could do that. I did actually try doing that with
    openoffice to expand the functionality of its excel equivalent once
    but found that their required testing regime was horrendous so I
    just gave up.

I think the difference here is that symlinks is /effectively/ unmaintained, so there wouldn't be a ton of resistance if you just forked it, made the changes you wanted and then suggested these be rolled back into a distro.

The only other way that package is likely to get attention is if someone discovers an RCE in it, in which case the community/a vendor with a vested interest would fix 'upstream' (even though there isn't really an active upstream as far as I can tell) and then backport fixes if needed.

That said, I've never maintained anything other than internal org SPEC files and I suspect the investment in maintenance is probably significant. Replace it (or wrap it) with a local Python script, might be easier?

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