Tar and rsync are just examples of known functionality utilities that read-symlink would enable.  If they were suitable for my desired cloud backup purposes, I wouldn't care so much about this one system call.

- Harold

----- Original message -----
From: John Cowan <xxxxxx@ccil.org>
Date: Wednesday, July 31, 2019 3:30 PM

True, but the purpose of the SRFI is not to allow you to rewrite standard Posix utilities in Scheme.

On Wed, Jul 31, 2019 at 4:20 PM Göran Weinholt <xxxxxx@weinholt.se> wrote:
John Cowan <xxxxxx@ccil.org> writes:

> On Wed, Jul 31, 2019 at 2:40 PM Göran Weinholt <xxxxxx@weinholt.se> wrote:
>
> > The read-symlink procedure seems to have disappeared in commit eadc8f82,
> > "editorial and minor functional changes", right after draft 3. Was that
> > intentional? There is no way to have the same functionality if that
> > procedure is not provided.
>
> It's not clear to me that it's actually useful in typical programs,
> unless you want to write your own ls -l implementation. Googling
> around shows no one explaining the purpose of it.

You'd need read-symlink to create a tar archiver. Providing it is also
more in line with Scheme tradition, because with read-symlink you can
implement real-path, but with real-path you cannot implement
read-symlink.

The Linux kernel provides readlink() and not realpath(). While it's
probably good to provide real-path as well, I would prefer removing that
one if only one could be kept.

Regards,

--
Göran Weinholt
https://weinholt.se/