symbolic link curiousity in 3.6.0

Tue Apr 1 22:32:55 GMT 2025

>> traditionally (and I'm talking about 7th edition Unix) a single
>> output line of 'ls' corresponded to a state obtained atomically from the
>> file system. I realize we can't always do that nowadays but the further we
>> depart from it, the worse 'ls' users will be.
> The link dereferencing is a courtesy of LS, and in no way it is guaranteed to
> be stable in a long run.

Not sure I get the point here. Although 7th edition Unix didn't have 
symlinks, the idea that 'stat' should be atomic is valid even in the 
presence of symlinks.
Is your point that 'stat', which follows symlinks, might give results 
that don't correspond to any state of the filesystem at any time in the 
past? If so, I'm not sure I agree (at least for filesystems that do 
things atomically as POSIX requires); if not, then I am not 
understanding the point.