On Jul 27, 2011, at 12:19 AM, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
Ok, apparently the decision to make hard links for executables dates at least back to:
That still doesn't explain *why* hardlinks were originally chosen instead of symlinks. In the absence of any other compelling argument against it, I think they should all consistently be symlinks. I don't see any Ubuntu or Debian (where /usr/bin/python3 -> python3.2) bug reports indicating any problems, and I haven't experienced any issues with it personally.
changeset: 16221:588691f806f4 branch: legacy-trunk user: Neil Schemenauer
date: Wed Jan 24 17:11:43 2001 +0000 files: Makefile.pre.in description: Flat makefile based on toplevel Makefile.in and makefiles in build subdirectories. Those other makefiles will go away eventually. [...]
+# Install the interpreter (by creating a hard link to python$(VERSION)) +bininstall: altbininstall + -if test -f $(BINDIR)/$(PYTHON); \ + then rm -f $(BINDIR)/$(PYTHON); \ + else true; \ + fi + (cd $(BINDIR); $(LN) python$(VERSION)$(EXEEXT) python$(EXEEXT)) +
-Barry