Comment 4 for bug 154602

Interesting. Jim Meyring's answer did not make it here (although, AFAICS, it was correctly addressed). So, here it is:

Jens Ropers wrote:
> 2009/3/30 jaduncan <email address hidden>:
>> This is correct behaviour as per POSIX - it's how it should work!
>
> Says who?

I'm confident that POSIX does not require
cp -r dir dir to create dir/dir ;-)

>> This is something that would be an upstream bug, but they will not want
>> to change this behaviour.
>
> Well, have you asked them?

I don't like the existing behavior, but this is a rather hairy corner of
copy.c already, and considering we're talking about the state left after
the user runs a bogus command (which is surprisingly hard to detect _in
general_), I'm in no big hurry to fix it.

However, if someone sends in a perfect patch,

  http://git.sv.gnu.org/cgit/coreutils.git/plain/HACKING

I'll be very interested.