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> stopped supporting symlinks because they “caused problems”. If the reason for that was really written with such vagueness, it's almost certain that there was
by otikik 3y ago
> stopped supporting symlinks because they “caused problems”.
If the reason for that was really written with such vagueness, it's almost certain that there was some sort of vulnerability / Security issue. The most vague, the most serious the issue. If it was just "they cause problems" then someone somehow figured out how to use symlinks to get access to someone else's data.
- JohnFen 3y ago> The most vague, the most serious the issue. It depends. When I was working on security software, any problems that impacted security were explained to customers in great detail. Problems that were merely embarrassing, though, were always described in the vaguest possible terms.
- rbtying 3y agoIt's been a long while since I worked there, but IIRC one of the big issues at the time was that the symlink "support" couldn't actually work properly: - some users want symlinks to be synced as symlinks (and they might not know it, old Apple file formats have internal symlinks), so their files got corrupted if they were accessed on another computer - some users want the sync client to follow the symlink and copy all the files at the destination, which requires the client to listen to filesystem events for potentially the entire filesystem, which is no longer permitted in many cases so, not exactly a vulnerability, but a mix of security and product issues.