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[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
...Cool, but the problem there is that it is now possible to have broken hardlinks. Broken symlinks we're all used to, but broken hardlinks usually represent a more critical problem.
The solution I suggest is to throw out the "one volume, one tree" requirement.
The volume's tree then becomes a forest, with every file with no parent in the
volume being the root of a tree. (Of course, if you also have multiple
hard links to directories, then the trees are instead directed, acyclic
graphs.) You could think of them all as being mount points, but in fact the
volume would have no fixed mount points at all.
Taking a step back, if all the filesystems on a system were so, then any file inThe problem here is that if the link itself is on a different filesystem than the actual data, and the original filesystem gets nuked, what do I do about the link? Traditionally, in order to delete a link, you drop the refcount of whatever it points to. Here, you'd be left with the choice of either having a way to forceably remove a link, even if it can't adjust the refcount, and have "lost chains" or orphaned files, or you'd be left with certain links that you cannot remove without reformatting that filesystem -- possibly in the process creating more such links on other filesystems. Or you could just not have the refcounts (or, indirectly, the deletion of the file) have anything to do with any hardlinks (maybe "firmlinks"?) on other partitions/filesystems, but then the file goes away when all hardlinks are gone, leaving these "firmlinks" broken.
any location in the computer's global filesystem tree (or graph) could in
principle be on any of the computer's (sub)filesystems regardless of what
(sub)filesystem its parents were on. Thus the answer to your question above
I guess the main problem I have with this is that it only works when we're talking about all the filesystems on the local machine, and then only so far. It kind of falls apart with removable filesystems like floppies and cds.
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