The reason it was done so is "efficiency" - supporting symlinks to directories would require traversing and statting each directory on the path.
But now that is done anyway, to check permissions on directories. The reason I didn't symlinks that time was idea that for root, that traversing isn't required, or specifically, it is better to do it in reverse order, so peroformance on non-symlinked files wasn't affected. Well, I guess such optimisations to be postponed for later time ;-)
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The reason it was done so is "efficiency" - supporting symlinks to directories would require traversing and statting each directory on the path.
But now that is done anyway, to check permissions on directories. The reason I didn't symlinks that time was idea that for root, that traversing isn't required, or specifically, it is better to do it in reverse order, so peroformance on non-symlinked files wasn't affected. Well, I guess such optimisations to be postponed for later time ;-)