Filesystem Misinformation [was Re: Homebrew]

[Ryan Schmidt]

On May 18, 2010, at 18:45, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:

> On May 18, 2010, at 7:14 AM, Jack Howarth wrote:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> So, so far we have a number of "interesting assertions" here:
> 
> 1. Hard links don't play nicely with Time Machine
> 
> 2. Hard links are not adequately accounted for by du/Finder/etc in determining the number of blocks allocated to MacPorts
> 
> 3. Hard links are slower than symlinks under HFS
> 
> Sadly, each and every one of those assertions is also false and would have been provably false had anyone actually decided to crunch some numbers (or "try it") for each assertion.  Can we try to keep things at least reasonably factual as we debate the differences in Homebrew vs MacPorts? It will save time and energy. :-)

I was trying to be factual, but I misremembered my facts. It was not both "du" and Finder "Get Info" that misreport the size; it was only "Get Info." Please see this discussion from last month:

http://lists.macosforge.org/pipermail/macports-users/2010-April/019628.html

"du -sh" shows one of my MacPorts prefixes takes 1.9 GiB but Finder's Get Info shows it occupies 3.9 GB.