[NTLUG:Discuss] Is there a way to change permissions of a link

[Richard Cobbe]

Lo, on Wednesday, November 1, Steve Baker did write:

> Richard Cobbe wrote:
> 
> > However, you are correct, both hard and soft links are far more capable and
> > consistent than Windows's shortcuts.  As far as I can tell, those are of
> > interest ONLY to the explorer/desktop.  Trying to open a shortcut in, say,
> > MS Word will get you an error (unless they've added code to Word to follow
> > shortcuts; it wasn't there the last time I used Word).
> 
> This is typical of M$'s approach to that kind of thing - each application
> has to separately handle these 'shortcuts'. Providing enough applications
> do that, it starts to look like a proper OS feature - and the few
> applications that don't do it start to look like they have bugs.
> 
> The same was true with things like file redirection in DOS.  Only programs
> that bothered to look for a '>' on the command line would have redirection,
> those that didn't do so just ended up trying to create files called '>'!
> 
> The Linux/UNIX philosophy of having the infrastructure take care of this
> stuff and only the couple of specialised programs that need to know whether
> something is a link or not have to take special care to get things right.

Warning, the following is a complaint I've made before about the state of
the industry.  If you've heard me gripe about this before, there's nothing
new here....

Why is the concept of moving common code into a library or the kernel so
alien to these folks?  For that matter, why is the concept of moving common
code so far away as a separate *function* within the same module so alien
to so many of my co-workers?

Do these people *enjoy* fixing bugs 3 and 4 times over instead of just
once?

I know there are some CS teachers in the audience here.  We *do* still
teach the idea of abstracting common code out into a separate function,
right?  I know *I* learned that back in high school!

</rant>

I'm wondering if it would be a good and useful thing to teach a class in
good software design from the other perspective: giving the students the
source to a medium-sized buggy project and having them fix the bugs.  Do
three or four: 

  * one with no documentation and bad (formatting) style
  * one with documentation, but with buggy code repeated 4 and 5 times
    through the project.  Ideally, include some problems that are usually
    the result of cut-n-paste coding.
  * one with good documentation AND good use of abstraction.

This, I think, would drive home the value of documentation and abstraction
in a far more effective manner than a series of lectures.

(For an added challenge, require the students to find the bugs, either by
running tests or by reading the code.)

We now return to your regularly-scheduled discussion of symbolic links....

Richard