From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Hubert Chan Subject: Re: More on Hard Links Date: Tue, 09 Dec 2003 22:05:30 -0500 Sender: news Message-ID: <87n0a1wex1.fsf@uhoreg.ca> References: <20031209234740.27534.qmail@web25010.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> <20031210001327.54822.qmail@web25005.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Return-path: list-help: list-unsubscribe: list-post: Errors-To: flx@namesys.com List-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: reiserfs-list@namesys.com >>>>> "Narcoleptic" == Narcoleptic Electron writes: [...] Narcoleptic> Think of the non-writable, offline file as a "cached" Narcoleptic> version of the file, and you can make a copy for Narcoleptic> modification if you wish. I don't see a usability issue Narcoleptic> here. Here's a use case: there's a shared file, "foo.txt", that I am working with collaboratively with a bunch of other people. It resides on a network volume. I decide I want a local copy on my laptop, so I make a hardlink on my local disk. Now I take my laptop home, so it's no longer connected to the network. The other guys want to make some changes, but since the file has a remote link that isn't mounted, it's unwritable. The guys are annoyed at having to copy the file, leaving "foo.txt" hanging there. (They're even more annoyed when they find out that I had mass-hardlinked the whole directory.) They track me down and beat me up. :-P It's even worse if "foo.txt" was, say, actually a configuration file in /etc, so you can't just copy it and make changes, because the program won't be able to find the new version. It's a bit of a contrived example, but not *completely* ridiculous. -- Hubert Chan - http://www.uhoreg.ca/ PGP/GnuPG key: 1024D/124B61FA Fingerprint: 96C5 012F 5F74 A5F7 1FF7 5291 AF29 C719 124B 61FA Key available at wwwkeys.pgp.net. Encrypted e-mail preferred.