Bug#835641: diffoscope: traceback when comparing dangling symlink to directory

[Chris Lamb]

tags 835641 - patch
thanks

Hi Brett,

Thanks for sending this patch and sorry its taken us so long to get to
it.

However, I don't think its quite ready in the sense that it only captures
the case where specify such files on the command line, rather than within
the entirity of diffoscope.

In other words, we would only be catching this in the top-level
`compare_root_paths" rather than further within the diffoscope machinery.

Imagine a (say) .iso contain a dangling symlink to a directory, etc. We
should catch these cases uniformly.

(Thus, the use of sys.exit(2) is also a bad smell, but that's an effect
rather than a cause of using `compare_root_paths` and so probably doesn't
need discussion now.)

I would also like to see a test for any behaviour change; these dangling
symlink issues have been accidentally reverted in the past and I wouldn't
want your changes to suffer the same consequences!


Regards,

-- 
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     : :'  :     Chris Lamb
     `. `'`      lamby at debian.org / chris-lamb.co.uk
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