I've been watching this thread a little, and every time I see another
suggestion made, I have to cringe... ;-(

Could someone post the relevant parts of the relevant standards, so we can
all work on real data, please?

My $0.02 worth are like so:  traditionally, symlinks were owned by UID & GID
zero, and had perms 777.  In effect, they were like hard-links, just that
they could a) span devices, b) point to nowhere, and c) point to themselves.
The mode and owner of the sym-link did not mean anything.

Now, from an admin's viewpoint, I do like knowing who made the link.  As such,
having the inode of the sym-link take the user of the person that created the
link is a nice idea.  However, I don't think the perms and UID/GID of the link
should be used in any other way.  It makes little sense to have any sort of
protection based on this, other than maybe using the UID for +t directories so
only the owner can delete the sym-link.

Also, kludging up the directory structure makes no sense to me.  Why do you
want to hack up something beautifull?  Why masacre (sp?) a thing of simplicity,
flexibility and function?  For speed?  Gimme a break, a quick check of a
machine running NetBSD-1.0a/i386, shows that there are 676 sym-links, of which
the X11R6 installation is using 618, which leaves ~60 for the rest of the system.

--Toby.
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