Finally got sick of the old mess and re-wrote the Qt autoconfiscation I use in LyX and oprofile. Now I dumped all the KDE-1 derived "second guess the user" crap, it's much simpler and hopefully far more robust, even when dealing with bogosities like systems where the library is -lqt2 (derr). The LyX Qt port is picking up its pace a little bit now.
Bram, I must confess to being a little bemused by your tirade against link(2). Your suggested improvement smacks of policy to me. I can think of numerous scenarios where losing the ability to recover the information EEXIST gives you would be a major PITA. In contrast, if you want the idempotency you suggest, it's a 3-second job to make a wrapper. link(2) may not be that great (lying on NFS) but what you describe is definitely not a flaw.