On Wed, 20 Jul 2011 01:53:09 -0500 Kerrick Staley <mail@kerrickstaley.com> wrote:
On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 3:03 AM, Ned Deily <nad@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.