Alastair Reid writes:
>
> Using device number-inode pairs fixes the symbolic link problems
> (and, I believe, does a slightly better job than the "realpath" function
> which is the most obvious approach).
>
> I'm told this doesn't work over NFS.
> I don't think I was told _why_ it doesn't work but I guess NFS
> has some kind of restriction like not being able to obtain the
> "absolute name" (eg IP address + device number) of the disk
> you're grabbing files from.
>
This is news to me, anyone got any pointers to where/why NFS software
doesn't guarantee that device numbers of mounted disks aren't unique?
ghc/lib/std/cbits/getLock.c in the fptools repository contains the
code used by GHC to implement file locking.
For the only ghc supported platform that doesn't have i-nodes (Win32),
we're depending on cygwin32 to save the day. It hashes filenames to
generate i-node numbers and derives device numbers from the result
of calling GetFileInformationByHandle()
--Sigbjorn
