Replace duplicates with symlinks [SOLVED]

[Derek Broughton]

Brian McKee wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 3:19 PM, Smoot Carl-Mitchell <smoot at tic.com>
> wrote:

>> Interesting tool.  However, you need to be very careful about merging
>> file with it.  It compares files by checksumming the contents.  Files
>> which are identical at a point in time, may not be appropriate to
>> replace with either hardlinks or symlinks. The tool found a lot if
>> identical files in my .evolution directory which would not be
>> appropriate to symlink.
> 
> That's interesting - you have more than one file with the same
> checksum that are not identical?
> I thought that was mathematically very unlikely...
> 
No, I think his point is that it's entirely reasonable to have copies of
files - say for backups - that you _don't_ want to be kept in sync with
their originals.  Imagine a CVS-like system that kept copies rather than
diffs - and then going back to it and finding that _all_ your versions were
identical!
> 
> And I assume we are talking hard links not soft links?

Why?  Does it really make a difference?  
-- 
derek