Re: gtags and symbolic links

[Shigio YAMAGUCHI]

Hi,
> First of all, I'm thinking about implementing the nofollow option for gtags, 
> as
> proposed on [2]. My question is, how exactly should this behave: should that
> only omit symbolic links that point to a directory or should that ignore
> symbolic links completely (e.g. ./foo.c pointing to ./bar.c) ?

I have not thought about details yet.
Is there something proposal?

> When thinking about it and looking into the code, I don't quite understand the
> following part of find_read_traverse()  (libutil/find.c):
...
> To be specific, what's the purpose of lines 539-551? If I'm not mistaken, the
> test at line 545 can never succeed because it is the opposite of the test at
> line 538.

It might be so. But at present, this code is harmless.

> Next, is there any benefit of determining the type of a file in getdirs()
> function (I mean prefixing the filename with f,d) instead of determining =
> the
> type directly in the find_read_traverse() function?

This is due to a historical reason.
In some systems like BSD, dirent structure has a member named 'd_type' which
describes file type. Determining type by it, we can avoid to calling stat(2)
for each files.  But another systems like GNU/Linux doesn't has it.
I wanted to hide the difference in a basic function, getdirs().

By the way, GLOBAL doesn't use the 'd_type' currently due to the following bug:
[http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-global/2003-08/msg00002.html]

> And finally: what actually made me start thinking about this is fact that 
> gtags
> can not treat recursive links, like in [3]. This actually makes it difficult 
> to
> use gtags on directories created by quilt setup, because quilt creates exactly
> this type of directory structure (for a good reason). This could be worked
> around by the nofollow option, but IMHO the recursive link detection should be
> done also in default mode - what do you think?

What is quilt setup?
What should GLOBAL do?
--
Shigio YAMAGUCHI <address@hidden>
PGP fingerprint: D1CB 0B89 B346 4AB6 5663  C4B6 3CA5 BBB3 57BE DDA3