Comment 2 for bug 48444

A long time ago, I tried to get that fixed. The patch stayed in my branch for a while, and was posted for merge a couple of times, but it never happened. That was before the review process was set up.

The basic idea is that symlinks should be traversed for every path step except for the final one. So we retain the ability to operate explicitly on symlink files, while being able to traverse them.

Attaching a patch, which is almost certainly hopelessly bitrotten, but illustrate the point.

Another important case, is to fail properly when a tree contains a symlink to a directory and the use tries to operate on a name below that symlink. That should work using the realname if the ultimate file is in the tree, and that should fail if it's outside the tree. I do not know if my patch handles this case.