Thomas Lotze wrote: > I'd like to make the decision about using a private or shared copy more > explicit and foreseeable. The obvious way to do this is adding another > keyword parameter to the download call that expresses whether hard-linking > should be attempted. I'm however not at all clear on what would be a > sensible default value: > > Using a shared copy may not be desirable if client code is going to modify > the file after downloading, so attempting to create hard links by default > is the more dangerous behaviour. Always copying, on the other hand, means > that when using a cache (or "downloading" a file-system resource) every > download creates multiple copies of potentially large files in the file > system, which is unnecessary in what I think is the majority of cases.
Since nobody seems to have a strong opinion on the matter, I'm going to go ahead and use a default value that means creating copies. This feels like the cleaner solution as it creates no surprises and puts optimisation at the user's descretion. -- Thomas _______________________________________________ Distutils-SIG maillist - [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
