Re: rename("symlink-to-dir/", "name") behavior

[Jim Meyering]

Eric Blake <address@hidden> wrote:
> I wrote the aardvark along those lines, and it was rejected in yesterday's
> meeting of the Austin Group.  They argued that Linux is allowed to fail to
> follow symlink-to-dir/ in the rename and rmdir case, but only if it
> returns a different errno than ENOTDIR.
>
> https://www.opengroup.org/sophocles/show_mail.tpl?CALLER=index.tpl&source=L&listname=austin-group-l&id=11349

Yeah, I saw that exchange.
Too bad.  Thanks for trying.

> I wonder if we would have much luck proposing a patch to the Linux kernel
> folks to do just that?

Do you see another errno symbol name that makes sense?
I think that ENOTDIR makes the most sense from a semantic point of view.
It might be a hard sell.

> Otherwise, I'm afraid that coreutils mv and rmdir
> will just have to remain non-POSIX-compliant on Linux because the
> underlying syscall is violating semantics.

That would be neither a problem nor anything new.  I think of it as
a feature: I try hard to maintain POSIX compliance, but not blindly,
and certainly not when doing so would make the tools behave in such an
unintuitive manner.