File metadata API with symlink-awareness #143
Description
There is a need for a more general file Metadata API with better awareness of symbolic links:
- Lots of operations today traverse symbolic links, which is not always what users want.
- Users may be interested in collecting a snapshot of all the metadata at once (akin to stat(2)), which is more efficient than doing it multiple times and avoids non-atomicity.
There is already a sketch of this API as an internal data type: https://github.com/haskell/directory/blob/master/System/Directory/Internal/Posix.hsc#L150
What needs to be done next is to stabilize this into a usable public API.