FilePermission makes symlinks useless

I have a directory /classes. Underneath it I populate it with class
hierarchies from various places via symlinks, e.g.,
    /classes/net/jini -> /files1/classes/net/jini
    /classes/com/sun -> /files2/classes/com/sun

If set my classpath to /classes, I am unable to load any classes (other
than the first one), because of the canonical pathname stuff that's
done in FilePermission. I can't even work around this with AllPermission.
To my mind, this is quite unacceptable. It essentially defeats the whole
purpose of symlinks.

I don't believe that FilePermission should be following symlinks and substituting to obtain a "real" path; it should only be doing syntactic regularization. (And certainly computing the canonical path just once, when the filesystem can change arbitrarily over time while a Java program is running, is just plain wrong.)


edward.jucevic@eng 1998-05-28
This problem also affects SAP

edward.jucevic@eng 1998-06-15
This no-longer affects SAP.
This issue causes the following JCK test failures:

api/java_nio/file/Files/Files.html#CreateTests[createSymbolicLink_MinPerms]
api/java_nio/file/Files/Files.html#CpMvDelTests[copy_SymLinkMinPermsNoFollow]
api/java_nio/file/Files/Files.html#CpMvDelTests[move_MinPermsMov]
api/java_nio/file/Files/Files.html#CpMvDelTests[move_MinPermsRen]

These testcases fail when the test is run with
-Dsun.io.useCanonCaches=false
and passes when the test is run with
-Dsun.io.useCanonCaches=true.

The issue was reported by IBM. All the mentioned tests have been excluded. Please see CR 7057265 for more details.