[Gnu-arch-users] Re: extended attributes

[Miles Bader]

Aaron Bentley <address@hidden> writes:
> While the link-breaking behavior is useful to Arch, I'm tempted to
> call it a bug.  My expectation of an editor is that it doesn't change
> the properties of the file (e.g ctime, permissions, # of links) -- it
> just changes its contents (and atime/mtime).

This `bug' is so ingrained into common tools, though, that you can't
just dismiss it as an issue.  Morever, the hard-link issue is real --
many non-unix filesystems simply don't support hard-links at all, and so
you don't need to worry about it, but unix does, and you have to.

Even if you could get agreement that create+rename is wrong, and agree
on new interfaces to replace the functionality lost by not using it, it
would be a _long_ time before they would be widespread enough that you
could forget about supporting the older mechanisms.

-Miles
-- 
Suburbia: where they tear out the trees and then name streets after them.