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by IshKebab 1616 days ago
Fewer bugs I imagine. I was reading up on symlinks (trying to find a good reference for how much of a bad idea they are) and found this: https://9p.io/sys/doc/lexnames.html

Kind of sad that Plan 9 got rid of them literally decades ago and we're still stuck dealing with their mess.

1 comments

What mess?
Read the page, but essentially `/foo/bar/..` is not the same as `/foo`. It makes loads of things way more complicated than you'd expect, e.g. normalising paths now requires filesystem access, and normalising paths that only partially exist is really complicated.

Another annoying issue is symlink loops, but I'm not sure if Plan 9's solution solves that.

It never caused me any real world problems, and I like making links. However am up for better solutions.