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#1 2009-03-06 15:11:16
- olive
- Member
- From: Belgium
- Registered: 2008-06-22
- Posts: 1,490
hard links
Examining my file system, I see that arch use a lot of hard links ("find / -mount -not -type d -links +1" to find file being hard linked). Is it really intentional? Why not use soft links instead? The problems with hard links is that it is not immediatly visible and you normally do not notice that two names refer to the same files. Also making backup of the whole filesystem; we should carefully check that the tools used manage hard links correctly.
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#2 2009-03-06 17:27:45
- Allan
- Pacman
- From: Brisbane, AU
- Registered: 2007-06-09
- Posts: 11,651
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Re: hard links
I'm guessing most of these are man pages and that is just the way they are installed. It sometimes makes no sense which to choose as the primary file and which should be the link.
Why would you back up / anyway? If you have a package list, pacman will restore this for you. Just backup config files.
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#3 2009-03-06 19:10:03
- Dieter@be
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- From: Belgium
- Registered: 2006-11-05
- Posts: 2,002
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Re: hard links
Why would you back up / anyway? If you have a package list, pacman will restore this for you. Just backup config files.
Yep. config files, ~ and some things in /var/lib maybe. That should be it.
< Daenyth> and he works prolifically
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#4 2009-03-07 06:40:42
- olive
- Member
- From: Belgium
- Registered: 2008-06-22
- Posts: 1,490
Re: hard links
There are a lot of reason to backup. The hard disk can died, moreover I do some experiment outside of pacman. I remember having restored a backup after having installed realplayer that put tons of files outside the directory where it was supposed to install.
Also when I want to install arch on a new computer; I usually make a copy of all the files present in my current installation instead of installing it normally. Note that it is not a real problem if we know we must pay attention to it: I usually use rsync which as a --hard-links options (but it is not implied by the --archive option so we must be careful to use it).
Simply my reproach to hard links is that it is not sufficiently visible; we understand what is on the file system better with soft links, but that is my opinion.
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