On 07/22/23 10:33, Adam Dinwoodie wrote:
On Fri, 21 Jul 2023 at 22:54, Jim Garrison via Cygwin wrote:
On 07/21/23 14:52, Brian Inglis wrote:
On 2023-07-21 14:59, Jim Garrison via Cygwin wrote:
Git comes with over 100 executables, mostly in /usr/libexec/git-core,
that all appear to be *hard* links to /bin/git, in both Cygwin and
Windows. The Windows fsutil command shows they're all hard linked:
[snip]
I'm curious to know if there's a specific reason for this implementation
that would make it the choice over symbolic links.
For the same reason you are complaining about backups not taking
hardlinks into account: to avoid distributing 400MB instead of 3MB.
Cygwin backup utilities should be able to deal with these e.g. rsync -H,
--hard-links, although it appears xcopy and robocopy may not under
Windows 10; don't know about other utilities or Windows 11.
But why not use symbolic links to accomplish the same thing?
A few reasons off the top of my head:
- This is what the Git build tooling does out of the box. Minimising
the number of changes we're making as a downstream packager makes my
life easier as package maintainer.
[snip]
Hopefully that's all useful and/or interesting, even if it's not the
answer you were hoping for!
Yes, that's very useful and now I understand and appreciate all the
good reasons for hard links. Thanks!
--
Jim Garrison
j...@acm.org
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