From: Jim Garrison <jhg@jhmg.net>
To: cygwin@cygwin.com
Subject: Re: Most git executables are hard links to git.exe?
Date: Sat, 22 Jul 2023 10:35:53 -0700 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <b917ab75-94d4-fae2-0a50-65b2ca3c82bf@jhmg.net> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CA+kUOa=PaUHpv6cyJnwab_cRxZz9+b+=P-vkzUtnk7SSvXce2g@mail.gmail.com>
On 07/22/23 10:33, Adam Dinwoodie wrote:
> On Fri, 21 Jul 2023 at 22:54, Jim Garrison via Cygwin wrote:
>>
>> On 07/21/23 14:52, Brian Inglis wrote:
>>> On 2023-07-21 14:59, Jim Garrison via Cygwin wrote:
>>>> Git comes with over 100 executables, mostly in /usr/libexec/git-core,
>>>> that all appear to be *hard* links to /bin/git, in both Cygwin and
>>>> Windows. The Windows fsutil command shows they're all hard linked:
>> [snip]
>>>> I'm curious to know if there's a specific reason for this implementation
>>>> that would make it the choice over symbolic links.
>>>
>>> For the same reason you are complaining about backups not taking
>>> hardlinks into account: to avoid distributing 400MB instead of 3MB.
>>>
>>> Cygwin backup utilities should be able to deal with these e.g. rsync -H,
>>> --hard-links, although it appears xcopy and robocopy may not under
>>> Windows 10; don't know about other utilities or Windows 11.
>>
>> But why not use symbolic links to accomplish the same thing?
>
> A few reasons off the top of my head:
>
> - This is what the Git build tooling does out of the box. Minimising
> the number of changes we're making as a downstream packager makes my
> life easier as package maintainer.
>
[snip]
> Hopefully that's all useful and/or interesting, even if it's not the
> answer you were hoping for!
Yes, that's very useful and now I understand and appreciate all the
good reasons for hard links. Thanks!
--
Jim Garrison
jhg@acm.org
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2023-07-22 17:35 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 8+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2023-07-21 20:59 Jim Garrison
2023-07-21 21:52 ` Brian Inglis
2023-07-21 21:54 ` Jim Garrison
2023-07-22 5:55 ` Larry
2023-07-22 17:33 ` Adam Dinwoodie
2023-07-22 17:35 ` Jim Garrison [this message]
2023-07-30 0:32 ` L A Walsh
2023-07-31 13:36 ` Andrey Repin
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