Errors with ENOENT when directory is a dangling link

[phated]

I think we can either fix the error case or show a better error. Ref https://github.com/cristianl/testcase-vinyl-bug

cc @erikkemperman

[phated]

@erikkemperman this probably got buried in other emails. Do you have any thought on what the behavior should be for mkdirp'ing on a dangling symlink?

[erikkemperman]

@phated Sorry for late reply, pretty swamped just now... If the problem here is that we’re trying to create a directory under an ancestor which is a dangling link, I’d say throwing an error would be the correct thing to do.

Probably something went wrong earlier, and quietly replacing the dead link with a regular directory just makes that harder to track down.

Does that help?

[phated]

The issue is that fs.stat fails with ENOENT when called on a dangling link - which we propagate. I think that's incorrect because something does exist on the filesystem, but it's that dangling link. I was also thinking we could maybe create a directory that the dangling link is pointing at. Not sure.

[phated]

@erikkemperman So mkdir -p dangling-link/foo/bar errors with mkdir: dangling-link/foo/bar: Not a directory but mkdir -p symlink/foo/bar does the mkdirp at the target of the link. Maybe we should lstat/readlink and then mkdirp at the target?

[phated]

Otherwise we could continue to error but do it with a better message? I want to determine the most intuitive behavior for this and don't necessarily want to mirror mkdir -p.

Also, this issue was brought to my attention because some user was trying to mkdirp at a dangling link.

[erikkemperman]

IMHO the behaviour of mkdir -p makes a lot of sense, actually, the "danger" being that we'd be obfuscating an earlier problem otherwise. And actually the error message I am now seeing on your dangling-link branch is decent enough, it seems to me, in that it mentions the missing target at least. A trace would be nice, but that's part of a larger issue if I've been tracking things properly?

[phated]

I guess it just feels wrong... I'm going to think on this some more.

[phated]

Comments that I forgot to tie this to:
gulpjs/gulp#2086 (comment)
gulpjs/gulp#2086 (comment)