Homebrew

[Jack Howarth]

On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 07:48:39AM -0500, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> 
> On May 18, 2010, at 07:45, Daniel J. Luke wrote:
> 
> >> Where do symlinks shine when compared to hardlinks?
> > 
> > They don't.

I can't find the link at the moment but I am pretty sure that
hardlinks have a significant performance penalty under HFS
compared to symlinks. I recall it being something like 10-fold
slower because the hardlinks are kept in a flat file system
and HFS would require an rewrite to solve this.

> 
> Well, symlinks would fix the Time Machine issue, wouldn't they? Hardlinks are indistinguishable (to Time Machine, anyway) from real second copies of files, so Time Machine backs up twice, doesn't it? With symlinks it wouldn't. Not saying we should switch back to symlinks, and I know we have a branch in progress that already fixes this a different way (right?) just pointing out a case where symlinks have an advantage over hardlinks.
> 
> Personally, I've never made a hardlink, but I've made tons of symlinks. A standard OS distribution is also filled with symlinks. They can't be so bad.
> 
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