Re: [pacman-dev] RootDir using symlinks -> problem

On 9/29/07, Xavier <shiningxc@gmail.com> wrote:

I don't know how bad is it to use a non standard (glibc specific) feature. This is maybe already done everywhere in pacman, I really don't have the slightest clue about this :)

This always scares me, but I guess they're saying something similar to the fact that due to symlinks and such, the before or after path might be larger than PATH_MAX so no one knows how to figure out the buffer size. For instance.... if we're hundreds of directories deep in a tree, "./foo/bar" might be a valid path, but realpath is going to resolve the "./" part to the hundreds of directories and overflow PATH_MAX. It is an edge case, but the implications are scary.