On May 18, 2010, at 9:10 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote: > I don't use Time Machine; I don't know if this problem actually occurs. I > thought I remembered someone saying on the list some time ago that it did.
Our users often say things that are only partially correct ;-) I would want to test this before saying that it was actually a problem. >> The advantage being that a TM backup will take up a little less space (and >> be a little less broken when restored). The disadvantage being that it will >> re-expose all of the old bugs we saw in individual ports when we used >> symlinks. > > Again, I wasn't suggesting we change MacPorts to go back to using symlinks > instead of hard links. Ok, I thought you were advocating at least testing it again. > Andrea asked a general purpose question about the difference between symlinks > and hard links, and your response made it sound like there was no reason to > ever use symlinks, that they had no advantage at all. I was replying in the context of MacPorts image mode (since as a project, we've tried it before and it had problems that were fixed by switching to hard links). > I was pointing out a case where they do, and that in fact, it's hard links, > not symlinks, that are the peculiar/unusual entity to me; it would never > occur to me to create a hard link (I would use a symlink, or if necessary a > Mac OS alias). Even after using MacPorts for years and experiencing firsthand > that its hard links do what they do just fine, hard links still feel strange > to me. They don't fit neatly into my view of how filesystems work which was > formed by years of experience on Systems 6, 7, 8, & 9. There are a lot of things that are different in Mac OS X ;-) > Another problem with hard links is one that was discussed on a MacPorts list > not long ago, about determining how much space the MacPorts prefix takes up. > Both the "du" command and the Finder's Get Info window can't tell hard links > from real files and misreport the size of the prefix by counting the > hardlinked items twice. Symlinks wouldn't have this problem. Have you verified this? The manpage for du says: "Files having multiple hard links are counted (and displayed) a single time per du execution. Directories having multiple hard links (typically Time Machine backups) are counted a single time per du execution." -- Daniel J. Luke +========================================================+ | *---------------- [email protected] ----------------* | | *-------------- http://www.geeklair.net -------------* | +========================================================+ | Opinions expressed are mine and do not necessarily | | reflect the opinions of my employer. | +========================================================+ _______________________________________________ macports-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macports-dev
