On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 07:48:39AM -0500, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> 
> On May 18, 2010, at 07:45, Daniel J. Luke wrote:
> 
> >> Where do symlinks shine when compared to hardlinks?
> > 
> > They don't.

I can't find the link at the moment but I am pretty sure that
hardlinks have a significant performance penalty under HFS
compared to symlinks. I recall it being something like 10-fold
slower because the hardlinks are kept in a flat file system
and HFS would require an rewrite to solve this.

> 
> Well, symlinks would fix the Time Machine issue, wouldn't they? Hardlinks are 
> indistinguishable (to Time Machine, anyway) from real second copies of files, 
> so Time Machine backs up twice, doesn't it? With symlinks it wouldn't. Not 
> saying we should switch back to symlinks, and I know we have a branch in 
> progress that already fixes this a different way (right?) just pointing out a 
> case where symlinks have an advantage over hardlinks.
> 
> Personally, I've never made a hardlink, but I've made tons of symlinks. A 
> standard OS distribution is also filled with symlinks. They can't be so bad.
> 
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