[MERGE] Implement hard-link support for branch and checkout

Aaron Bentley aaron at aaronbentley.com
Thu Jan 3 00:00:00 GMT 2008


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Robert Collins wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-12-20 at 17:06 -0500, Aaron Bentley wrote:
> 
> 
>> My recent acceleration work was initially sparked by the notion of doing
>> hardlinks because I expected hard links to be much faster.  But I broke
>> it into logical steps, and discovered you don't need hard links to reap
>> most of the speed benefits.  Don't mean they're a bad idea, though.
> 
> I think it's great you broke it up into steps; I often find surprising
> results myself when I do that :).
> 
> I don't think hardlinking is a good idea, because its *surprising* to
> users, if they forget where things were linked to, or there editor
> changes behaviour; and while it's true that they can tell, if they
> remember to check there are failure modes where they won't notice - and
> may be running code from the place what was surprisingly changed.

I don't think one size fits all.  For novice users, yes, this can be
problematic.  But there are plenty of experienced users who know how to
use hard links properly and would welcome the space-savings.  I count
myself among them.

I don't want to make people shoot themselves in the foot, but holding
back this capability from those who could benefit is like cutting off
their feet so they don't shoot themselves in the foot.

Aaron

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