symlink changes

[Corinna Vinschen]

Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> [...]
> While testing it (this change implies reconfiguring and new compiling
> of fileutils) I found a surprising error in chown.c and chgrp.c:
> 
> While differentiating between changing a link or the referenced file,
> both tools call `lstat' for getting owner/group information. This
> gives wrong results, because both tools check out if at least the
> owner or the group changes. If you then try to change the owner of
> the file to the same owner as of the link, lstat returns the owner
> of the link so that it doesn't call chown(2). Nothing is changed
> and chown/chgrp are sure to have done the right thing. Moreover
> chgrp has no option `--dereference' while the global variable
> `change_symlinks' is set to 1 by default!
> 
> You will find the error in linux, too, because it's really an
> error in the GNU fileutils sources.

I have sent the patch additionally to fileutils-bugs@gnu.ai.mit.edu.
As I have seen, there's no patch to fileutils since 1998. I hope
there's still somebody who feels responsible.

Corinna