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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