bug#79445: `ln -s` should raise a warning about pwd-relative vs symlink-location-relative targets

Paul Eggert <[email protected]> writes:

> On 2025-09-13 03:16, Chris wrote:
>> It seems to me it should be easy enough to alert users to this gotcha by
>> printing a warning to stderr when creating a symlink
>
> I dunno, that gotcha has been present in Unix and Linux for nearly 50
> years now, and lots of people are used to the gotcha would plausibly
> object to a warning.

FWIW, relative symbolic links and dangling symlinks are covered in the
manual. You can read it online [1], or using the following command in
your terminal:

    $ info '(coreutils) ln invocation'

I agree that it probably is a point of confusion for someones first
encountering symbolic links, but it is a perfectly valid use of them. So
I think emitting a warning there would cause some complaints.

New warnings tend to surprise people. I'm sure Paul remembers the many
long threads about the warning that 'egrep' and 'fgrep' are obsolete. :)

Collin

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/ln-invocation.html#ln-invocation