how to partially "link" highlighting groups?

Question

I'm trying to do this on my .vimrc:

hi link SyntasticErrorLine SignColumn
hi link SyntasticErrorSign SignColumn
hi SyntasticErrorSign guifg=red ctermfg=red

What I want is to have the SyntasticErrorSign highlighting group with the same background as SignColumn but with custom foreground colors.

Vim docs says:

- As soon as you use a ":highlight" command for a linked group, the link is removed.

So, the way I'm doing it won't work anyway, is there a way to achieve that?

Answer 1

@Kent answer was good, but it seems there's a problem with synIDattr when one doesn't pass the mode argument, it fails to return the attribute in GUI mode (gvim). I've learned this from vim-arline plugin sources.

I've solved my problem with:

hi link SyntasticErrorLine SignColumn

exec 'hi SyntasticErrorSign guifg=red ctermfg=red' .
            \' guibg=' . synIDattr(synIDtrans(hlID('SignColumn')), 'bg', 'gui') .
            \' ctermbg=' . synIDattr(synIDtrans(hlID('SignColumn')), 'bg', 'cterm')