[haiku-development] BFS's Lack Of Support For link() - hard links

  • From: Michael Franz <mvfranz@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 17 Nov 2009 22:05:59 -0500

Hi,

I was cleaning up my hard drive and found a pdf of 'Practical File System
Design:The Be File System, Dominic Giampaolo'. [1] On page 174 it discusses
why BFS does not support hard links or why it does not implement link().

"The link() function is not implemented by BFS or any of the other file
systems that currently exist on the BeOS. The primary reason for not im-
plementing hard links is that at the time BFS was being written, the C++
user-level file API was not prepared to deal with them. There was no time to
modify the C++ API to offer support for them, and so we felt that it would
be better not to implement them in the file system (to avoid confusion for
programmers). The case is not closed, however, and should the need arise, we
can extend the C++ API to better support hard links and modify BFS to
implement them."

Is this the same reason Haiku's implementation of BFS does not support hard
links?

Michael

1. http://www.letterp.com/~dbg/

Other related posts: