[haiku-development] Re: BFS's Lack Of Support For link() - hard links
- From: Ingo Weinhold <ingo_weinhold@xxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 18 Nov 2009 07:56:46 +0100
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
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