symlinks as directory entries vs. inodes

[Guy Harris]

> >I presume they just decided the added benefits weren't worth the hassle.
> 
> What are the benefits supposed to be again?

Well, to quote from the article that claimed they had added benefits:

> From: mangler at cit-vax.Caltech.Edu (System Mangler)
> Newsgroups: net.unix,net.unix-wizards
> Subject: Re: Are links as useful as they could be?
> Message-ID: <1059 at cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>
> Organization: California Institute of Technology
> Summary: symbolic links shouldn't have been inodes

> In article <21127 at rochester.ARPA> ken at rochester.UUCP (Comfy chair) writes:
> > I don't like symbolic links, there are some warts, like having to check
> > for looping, but I can't think of anything better.

> Warts... you can't chmod, chgrp, utime, or link them.
> The access time never means much, because doing an
> "ls -l" to see it has the side effect of changing it.

> Symbolic links are too expensive to use freely.  They take up
> an inode and 1K of disk space, just to hold a few characters.
> They carry all the baggage of a regular inode (atime, mtime,
> links, owner, group, mode) but you can't make proper use of
> any of it.

Since Don Speck was a defender of the "symbolic links as special directory
entry" idea, while I was not, I'll let him argue the point further.  Note,
however, that one of the objections - the first one listed - was not one of
resource consumption, but one of transparency.
-- 
	Guy Harris
	{ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy
	guy at sun.com (or guy at sun.arpa)