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

On Sat, Jan 7, 2012 at 5:17 AM, antoine.pitrou wrote:

http://hg.python.org/cpython/rev/1ea8b7233fd7 changeset:   74288:1ea8b7233fd7 user:        Antoine Pitrou 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@gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia