[Python-Dev] [Python-checkins] cpython: Issue #9993: When the source and destination are on different filesystems, (original) (raw)

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Sat Jan 7 14:22:44 CET 2012

On Sat, Jan 7, 2012 at 5:17 AM, antoine.pitrou <python-checkins at python.org> wrote:

http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/1ea8b7233fd7 changeset:   74288:1ea8b7233fd7 user:        Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> date:        Fri Jan 06 20:16:19 2012 +0100 summary:  Issue #9993: When the source and destination are on different filesystems, and the source is a symlink, shutil.move() now recreates a symlink on the destination instead of copying the file contents. Patch by Jonathan Niehof and Hynek Schlawack.

That seems like a fairly nasty backwards incompatibilty right there. While the old behaviour was different from mv, it was still perfectly well defined. Now, operations that used to work may fail - basically anything involving an absolute symlink will silently fail if being moved to removable media (it will create a symlink that is completely useless on the destination machine). Relative symlinks may or may not be broken depending on whether or not their target is also being copied to the destination media.

The new help text also doesn't say what will happen if the destination doesn't even support symlinks (as is quite likely in the removable media case).

Cheers, Nick.

-- Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia

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