Here, too, I'll repeat what you said back to you to make sure I understand: We *could* keep the SELF management in linked(), and everything would work. However, that would create a surprising asymmetry with unlinked(), which does *not* modify SELF anymore.

That sounds fine.

I could imagine that we would revisit this again if we stop deleting the PARENT entry, since presumably in that case we'd want to do all the work in linked() (since we need to do *some* of it there, as it's where we have a reference to the DirectoryEntry).

We'll see what happens. Thanks for the explanation.