Subject: Re: [boost] [modular boost] non-linked headers
From: Daniel James (daniel_at_[hidden])
Date: 2013-12-02 19:34:23


On 3 December 2013 00:17, Bjørn Roald <bjorn_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> On 12/03/2013 01:11 AM, Daniel James wrote:
>>
>> On 3 December 2013 00:08, Bjørn Roald <bjorn_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> yes, but b2 headers create hard links
>>
>>
>> It really should use soft links. Most programs don't change files in
>> place, so as soon as such a change is made the two entries will be
>> pointing to different inodes. Which defeats the purpose, since they
>> should always be the same.
>
>
> yes that would be bad.
>
> Is this behavior documented somewhere?

A bit of testing showed that "most" probably wasn't true, but it
definitely varies. But here's someone complaining about emacs breaking
hard links:

http://blog.hartwork.org/?p=25

'sed -i' also breaks hard links. I think it's actually configurable in
both emacs and vim, which is worse, because you can't know. The
problem is that it varies so it's unpredictable. Soft links are
consistent.