The trouble with symbolic links

Thinking about it some more, I suppose you could change the ownership of the containing folder, create *another* symlink to it, and then optionally change the ownership back. Then the file is effectively double-mapped. There might be some way around this by checking the ownership at runtime or some other extra checks or reference counters, but it definitely needs to be considered carefully.

I still don't see what the issue is with altering parent directories of the folder in question though, or what special capability symlinks add to that scenario.