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

  • From: Pier Luigi Fiorini <pierluigi.fiorini@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:38:41 +0100

2009/11/18 Ingo Weinhold <ingo_weinhold@xxxxxx>

>
> On 2009-11-18 at 04:05:59 [+0100], Michael Franz <mvfranz@xxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
> >
> > 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?
>
> Haiku's BFS implementation is on-disk compatible with Be's and to my
> knowledge it's a limitation of the on-disk structure design that prevents
> hard links from being possible.
>
> Not sure what exactly Dominic had in mind with "there was no time to
> modify the C++ API to offer support for them". IMO the only thing needed is
> the functionality to create them (e.g. a BDirectory::CreateLink()), which
> would be trivial to implement. The POSIX link() function is implemented (in
> BeOS and Haiku) and works as expected on file systems that support
> hardlinks.
>
> CU, Ingo
>
>
For what it's worth, it's probably time to avoid R5 compatibility on some
things - I know it's not scheduled until R2 but sometimes I think Haiku is
still cloning and old '90s OS...

Just my 0.5 cents

-- 
Some companies die
Be's beauty lives forever
in immortal rhyme

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