Re: [PATCH] symlink nesting level change

[Al Viro <viro@ftp.linux.org.uk>]

On Wed, May 03, 2006 at 06:35:54PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> It's a non-back-compatible change which means that people will install
> 2.6.18+, will set stuff up which uses more that five nested links and some
> will discover that they can no longer run their software on older kernels.
> 
> It'll only hurt a very small number of people, but for those people, it
> will hurt a lot.  And I can't really think of anything we can do to help
> them, apart from making the new behaviour runtime-controllable, defaulting
> to "off", but add a once-off printk when we hit MAX_NESTED_LINKS, pointing
> them at a document which tells them how to turn on the new behaviour and
> which explains the problems.  Which sucks.

Those people keep asking to lift that limit.  So no, I don't believe that
making it runtime-controllable is the right thing to do.  Document that
we'd lifted the limit to 8 and such setups become possible since <version>.
 
> But I guess as major distros are 2.6.16-based, this is a good time to make
> this change.

FWIW, RH kernels had that for more than a year by now...