Re: Several changes made to fts.c in Gnulib

[Kamil Dudka]

On Tuesday, July 25, 2017 09:10:09 Paul Eggert wrote:
> Kamil Dudka wrote:
> > Any chance to make the (still documented) -noleaf option of find work
> > again?
> I'm inclined to agree with Pádraig, in thinking that fts should Just Work
> without the complexity of an extra option to disable an optimization that is
> supposed to work.

With this reasoning, you could also deprecate gcc -O0 and the like because 
compiler optimizations should just work...

While I respect your opinion about removing this debugging facility upstream, 
the -noleaf option stays implemented in Fedora.  It has already helped me to 
quickly find the root cause of https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1299169 so I was 
able to report it to gnulib upstream and, based on that, Pádraig could revert 
the change that had been causing a serious regression in the upcoming release 
of coreutils.

There is no maintenance overhead with that already existing -noleaf option.  
Removing it would only complicate the life to users affected by this class
of bugs, support engineers, and file system developers.

Kamil

> As things stand, 'find' can disable leaf optimization by using a bigger
> hammer, namely, turn off FTS_CURDIR. However, my suggestion is to deprecate
> the -noleaf option while you're at it.