> If it's important to know that two names refer to the same file in a > remote filesystem, I don't see any way around adding a new concept of file > identifier to the protocol. actually there are 2 separate issues at hand, and this thread sort of confuses them into one: Statement 1: If two files have identical st_dev and st_ino, they MUST be hardlinks of each other/the same file. Statement 2: If two "files" are a hardlink of each other, they MUST be detectable (for example by having the same st_dev/st_ino) I personally consider statement 1 a mandatory requirement in terms of quality of implementation if not Posix compliance. Statement 2 for me is "nice but optional", the use case for it is VERY different, it's an optimization for a program like tar to not have to back a file up twice, while statement 1 is there to ensure that hardlinks CAN be backed up smartly. Let's please treat these as 2 separate issues, I agree they're somewhat related, but really they're a different kind of guarantee and have entirely different usecases as well. (oh and I'm very open to hearing about cases where a violation of statement 2 ends up being an actual problem) Greetings, Arjan van de Ven -- if you want to mail me at work (you don't), use arjan (at) linux.intel.com Test the interaction between Linux and your BIOS via http://www.linuxfirmwarekit.org - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
