Hi OCI! We are putting together some topics for clarification about the specs, and want to start sharing them slowly for discussion and possibly updating spec docs to have more clarification. For this point:

https://supercontainers.github.io/containers-wg/ideas/links_B6/

We are suggesting that the spec have more clarification with respect to how to deal with different kinds of links, as what to do in different situations is under-specified. For example:

1. When should symlinks be followed and when should they not?
2. Behavior of link replacement in a later layer is explicitly undefined.
3. Is it permitted to have a link that climbs outside the image? (E.g.: ln -s ../foo /bar). What about other pathological link targets?

One interesting quirk is that symlinks need to be interpreted relative to the image’s root, which makes non-containerized code trickier. For reference, it looks like the relative section is here: https://github.com/opencontainers/image-spec/blob/master/layer.md#hardlinks. Could we talk about a plan to clarify some of these points? Thank you!

cc @reidpr