cloning a drive [was: war story]

[William Park]

On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 12:53:42PM -0400, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> What's bad about symlinks?
> 
> - you need two sets of operations on them: the ones that actually deal
>   with the symlink, and ones that see through them to the referenced
>   file.  Think ls -L.  So this one feature multiplied the complexity
>   of the system.
> 
> - symlinks can be dangling: the name exists but it references nothing.
>   New odd condition.  New error handling paths needed.
> 
> - symlinks can create loops in the filesystem.  Not something possible
>   before.  So a tree traversal of a filesystem needs to guard against
>   that.
> 
> - symbolic links are affected by the system in which they are
>   interpreted.  symlinks mixed with NFS can be very confusing.
> 
> - there are absolute and releative symlinks.  I don't actually have an
>   accurate model of how to manipulate them, so I guess most people
>   don't.

One bad thing about hardlink is that, after updating it for a while
(say, compiling), you don't know which is new or old, or whether you did
'mv' or 'cp', or someone is editing it somewhere else, etc.
-- 
William
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