cloning a drive [was: war story]

Lennart Sorensen lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org
Wed Jul 27 18:33:57 UTC 2011


On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 02:00:41PM -0400, William Park wrote:
> 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.

And the symlink avoids this how?

-- 
Len Sorensen
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