Hardlinks in port images

Jeremy Lavergne jeremy at lavergne.gotdns.org
Thu Dec 13 08:22:29 PST 2012


> I was looking for the images of my installed ports when I stumbled on
> https://trac.macports.org/ticket/13143
> Is there a way to revert to the original behaviour? How is the new
> behaviour different from direct + archived packages?
> It seems to me the best solution would have just been to change the
> default settings (to direct + archived , so to not conflict with that
> broken backup system by default) and leave the choice to the users.
> But maybe it is just me not seeing the full picture here.
> Can somebody please help/ give me some insight?
> I'm just trying to save some space on a very tight 128GB disk, I'll
> move to direct if I must but I really liked the old behaviour (I find
> very useful to have different versions of some of the software I need)
> and I thought one of the future objectives was to link against the
> libraries in the image rather than in the default path to enable
> having incompatible libraries installed at the same time.

It has been quite a while since we used hardlinks. What we do now is keep a .tar.bz2 so the user can reinstall files without having to recompile them.

I'm not sure how useful truncating those backup archives will be since several packages themselves are several hundred megabytes. Whenever you need to reinstall a port, you'll need to remove those truncated archives so MacPorts will download them again.

Sounds like lots of handwringing to save a little space.



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