On Wed, 20 Jul 2011 01:53:09 -0500 Kerrick Staley <m...@kerrickstaley.com> wrote: > On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 3:03 AM, Ned Deily <n...@acm.org> wrote: > > I think adding the requirement to mandate hard link vs soft link usage > > is an unnecessary and unwarranted attempt at optimization. For > > instance, IIRC, the OS X installers don't use any hard links: that may > > complicate the install, plus hard links on OS X HFS* file systems are a > > bit of a kludge and not necessarily more efficient than symlinks. It's > > not a big deal but perhaps the wording should be changed to make a > > suggestion about hard links vs syminks rather than mandate which should > > be used. > > Ah, OK. The wording's been changed so that symbolic links will be > installed on Mac OS X and hard links elsewhere (although maybe > symbolic links are also better on certain other platforms; I'm not > sure). > > I do think that specific instructions must be given (rather than just > a suggestion) because it's indicating what must be done to CPython. > The instructions *should* be as close as possible to what the > installer already does, but I'm not entirely sure what the installer > does by default, and the hard-link recommendation was based off a > cursory inspection of my own system, so further input from yourself > and the rest of python-dev would be appreciated.
I think the recommendation should be symbolic links for all systems. Hard links are generally harder to discover, while it is trivial to find out that a given file is a symbolink link, and to which other file. The optimization is probably not useful in the real world (our executables are relatively small, and people worried about a couple of megabytes can always go for the shared library option). Regards Antoine. _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
