Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 4 Aug 2003 17:05:06 +0200 | From | Stephan von Krawczynski <> | Subject | Re: FS: hardlinks on directories |
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On Mon, 4 Aug 2003 09:33:44 -0500 Jesse Pollard <jesse@cats-chateau.net> wrote:
> Find for one. Any application that must scan the tree in a search. Any > application that must backup every file for another (I know, dump bypasses > the filesystem to make backups, tar doesn't).
All that can handle symlinks already have the same problem nowadays. Where is the difference? And yet again: it is no _must_ for the feature to use it for creating complete loops inside your fs. You _can_ as well dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda, but of course you shouldn't. Have you therefore deleted dd from your bin ?
> It introduces too many unique problems to be easily handled. That is why > symbolic links actually work. Symbolic links are not hard links, therefore > they are not processed as part of the tree. and do not cause loops.
tar --dereference loops on symlinks _today_, to name an example. All you have to do is to provide a way to find out if a directory is a hardlink, nothing more. And that should be easy.
> It was also done in one of the "popular" code management systems under > unix. (it allowed a "mount" of the system root to be under the CVS > repository to detect unauthorized modifications...). Unfortunately, > the system could not be backed up anymore. 1. A dump of the CVS filesystem > turned into a dump of the entire system... 2. You could not restore the > backups... The dumps failed (bru at the time) because the pathnames got > too long, the restore failed since it ran out of disk space due to the > multiple copies of the tree being created.
And they never heard of "--exclude" in tar, did they?
> The KIS principle is the key. A graph is NOT simple to maintain.
This is true. But I am very willing to believe reiserfs is not simple either, still it is there ;-)
Regards, Stephan - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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