From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!.POSTED.blaine.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Eli Zaretskii Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.devel Subject: Re: Docstring of make-symbolic-link Date: Thu, 13 Jun 2019 07:53:04 +0300 Message-ID: <837e9q13yn.fsf@gnu.org> References: <83h88w9p6x.fsf@gnu.org> <54a3ebd9-c981-3dbe-476a-a60b64833547@cs.ucla.edu> Injection-Info: blaine.gmane.org; posting-host="blaine.gmane.org:195.159.176.226"; logging-data="237264"; mail-complaints-to="usenet@blaine.gmane.org" Cc: eggert@cs.ucla.edu, emacs-devel@gnu.org To: Juanma Barranquero Original-X-From: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Thu Jun 13 06:53:18 2019 Return-path: Envelope-to: ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([209.51.188.17]) by blaine.gmane.org with esmtps (TLS1.2:ECDHE_RSA_AES_256_GCM_SHA384:256) (Exim 4.89) (envelope-from ) id 1hbHjg-000za5-Na for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Thu, 13 Jun 2019 06:53:16 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([::1]:36936 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.86_2) (envelope-from ) id 1hbHjf-0003fq-NA for ged-emacs-devel@m.gmane.org; Thu, 13 Jun 2019 00:53:15 -0400 Original-Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:470:142:3::10]:41551) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.86_2) (envelope-from ) id 1hbHjY-0003fX-Pw for emacs-devel@gnu.org; Thu, 13 Jun 2019 00:53:10 -0400 Original-Received: from fencepost.gnu.org ([2001:470:142:3::e]:53502) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1hbHjW-0006QH-SY; Thu, 13 Jun 2019 00:53:08 -0400 Original-Received: from [176.228.60.248] (port=4958 helo=home-c4e4a596f7) by fencepost.gnu.org with esmtpsa (TLS1.2:RSA_AES_256_CBC_SHA1:256) (Exim 4.82) (envelope-from ) id 1hbHjV-0006QT-Gl; Thu, 13 Jun 2019 00:53:06 -0400 In-reply-to: (message from Juanma Barranquero on Thu, 13 Jun 2019 00:31:39 +0200) X-detected-operating-system: by eggs.gnu.org: GNU/Linux 2.2.x-3.x [generic] X-BeenThere: emacs-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.23 Precedence: list List-Id: "Emacs development discussions." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: emacs-devel-bounces+ged-emacs-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Original-Sender: "Emacs-devel" Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.devel:237483 Archived-At: > From: Juanma Barranquero > Date: Thu, 13 Jun 2019 00:31:39 +0200 > Cc: Eli Zaretskii , Emacs developers > > Three people, two opinions. > > It's your call, Eli. LINKNAME or NEWNAME? I understand that you prefer NEWNAME as well, so I'm in a minority here. I don't want to force my opinion on this, for reasons that might become apparent from what I say below. I do want to explain my opinion, though, at least FTR. This NEWNAME thing never made much sense to me. When creating hard links, we call the function ADD-NAME-to-file, so NEW makes sense. With make-symbolic-link this reason is gone, and NEW is just out of the blue, as there's no OLD anywhere in sight. TARGET and LINK do make sense, and unlike Paul, I have no problems figuring out which one is created, since the function's name is make-symbolic-LINK, not make-symbolic-TARGET. I understand where Paul comes from: this description goes back to the old days of 4.2BSD Unix, where symbolic links were introduced, AFAIK. Look at the man pages from that era, you will see the same NEWNAME nonsense. So this is an old habit that dies hard, IMNSHO. I suspect that if we were to remove the NEWNAME part, many Unix old-timers will object like Paul did. Btw, the glibc manual at least tries to make it a bit more sensible: int symlink (const char *OLDNAME, const char *NEWNAME) [...] The 'symlink' function makes a symbolic link to OLDNAME named NEWNAME. So now you know my views on this, and can make up your mind. But whatever you do, let's do that on master, as the first pretest of Emacs 26.3 is already out, and I'd prefer to release it VSN, if possible. This text was with us since about forever, so no urgency to fix it in 26.3. Thanks.