[Libreoffice-bugs] [Bug 44982] EasyHack: add helper method to sal's File abstraction

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44982

--- Comment #8 from Michael Meeks <michael.meeks at novell.com> 2012-03-09 02:34:50 PST ---
yep - it's sad that the interface has to have this unfortunate 'isLink'
ambiguity that rather complicates symlinked situations, at least the
getLinkTargetURL() is a fully resolved path for this case - ie. following all
the symlinks down to the bottom via 'realpath'.

Which makes me wonder - why do we have salhelper/inc/salhelper/LinkResolver -
which is substantially un-used, and un-necessary for Unix [ cf. the above ].

I'd be eager to bin / deprecate / write-that out.


The isDirectory method creates the obvious cleanup in basic/ eg. of removing:

basic/source/runtime/methods.cxx-static inline sal_Bool isFolder(
FileStatus::Type aType )

But - of course isDirectory is also imprecise in this case, so all this code
breaks for symlinked directories as well as symlinked files :-)

git grep 'FileStatus.*Link' | nl

shows we have only 43 sites checking for and handling Links properly of which
20 are in sal & unit tests ;-)

git grep 'getFileStatus' | nl

shows 187 hits (100 in sal) ... so - in general we get link handling wrong it
seems in a large majority of cases.

So - we should fix this by default in our API. IMHO Link handling is a minority
use-case, primarily useful on writing files - to make sure we get the semantics
of unlink-replace vs. write-through-link right.

But of course we do a lot more reading than writing, and ~all directory / file
traversing code is broken.

Ergo - I think we need to tweak getFileStatus to do a better job by default.

I'll attach a patch; I think we need to go around checking each of those 87+
getFileStatus calls, to see if they are non-link-handling, and add a 'true'
parameter if they are not.

Then (I guess) we don't need to worry about the Link type being returned it
never will be. Concrete, actionable thoughts / improvements ?

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