Support for symlinks about svfs HOT 2 CLOSED

Out of curiosity, is it a standard way to deal with links in Swift?

from svfs.

As for now, there's no standard in Swift to handle symlinks.

AFAIK there is a spec being reviewed that claims to bring full symlink support. It proposes handling symlinks as 0 byte objects containing a X-Object-Symlink-Target-Object header and ensure operation consistency between symlinks and referenced objects.

In the meantime, one could use Swift manifests, but they aren't true symlinks : operations on a manifest don't work the same way than they would do on referenced object. For instance, let's say you created an object which is a directory. If you create a manifest referencing this object and send a GET request on this one, then you will not get the list of objects in this directory as a result, but the content of all files that are inside, because manifests reassemble referenced objects. An other problem lays in object metadata that should be copied to the manifest with obviously the requirement to synchronize these when they change. Such an implementation would be unsuitable I believe since coming up with usage quirks outside svfs.

We take the choice here to make symlinks unusable outside svfs, since that's what they truly are.

from svfs.