[Bug-cpio] Stripping leading './' from symlink targets...

[John Gregor]

Hi All,

This is probably a philosophical/religious argument, but I contend that the stripping of leading './' pairs from a symlink target is a bug.  One could argue that 'foo' and './foo' are semantically identical when being interpreted as a path, but they are different strings and might be interpreted differently by other software.  But, it shouldn't be cpio's job to change the contents of a symlink.

I ran into this because I'm using cpio to move trees under revision control from one place to another.  The changing of the symlink is showing up as a metadata change.

To reproduce:

        mkdir cpio-vs-cp ; cd cpio-vs-cp
        mkdir orig
        ln -s ./something orig/foo
        ls -la orig
        cp -a orig cp-out
        ls -la cp-out
        mkdir cpio-out; (cd orig; find . -print0 | cpio -ov -0 -H newc) | (cd cpio-out; cpio -dvim)
        ls -la cpio-out

Thanks,
-John Gregor