Re: [patch] romfs for 2.1.46

Linus Torvalds (torvalds@transmeta.com)
Wed, 23 Jul 1997 10:35:37 -0700 (PDT)

On Wed, 23 Jul 1997, Janos Farkas wrote:
>
> And some issues. Comments in fs/namei.c indicate that follow_link
> will be obsoleted (again) and has been removed, but now it is required
> (again?), which one is correct? Just because until do_follow_links
> is not rewritten, it will try to ->follow_link() on directories
> too, that broke the "clever" unified directory/symlink table of romfs,
> and circumventing this was easiest in do_follow_link().

follow_link is back, and it's back to stay. It got removed for two
patchlevels due to reasons that are no longer true with the new dcache.

> Is this "feature" (follow_link() on directories that this field) to
> stay? I'll need to add some bytes then... :)

It's here to stay. The code does ->follow_link if a pointer exists
(whether the inode is marked to be a symlink or not).

> Patch contents: first the patch to fs/namei.c to avoid trying follow_link
> for strange directories, this may or may not be required in later
> pre-patches.

This won't be applied. There are real reason why we may want to do
follow-link even on files that don't "appear" to be links.

> Next: the real update to 2.1.46. No new features, only to
> bring up the code to the fs interface of 2.1.4[56], and some documentation
> fixes/reformats.

Applied.

Linus