On Mon, Jul 28, 2025 at 6:30 PM Andrew Lutomirski <l...@mit.edu> wrote: > > > On Jul 24, 2025, at 7:02 PM, Aoife Moloney via devel-announce > > <devel-annou...@lists.fedoraproject.org> wrote: > > > > Wiki - > > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Hardlink_identical_files_in_packages_by_default > > Discussion thread - > > https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/f43-change-proposal-hardlink-identical-files-in-packages-by-default-self-contained/160769 > > > > This is a proposed Change for Fedora Linux. > > This document represents a proposed Change. As part of the Changes > > process, proposals are publicly announced in order to receive > > community feedback. This proposal will only be implemented if approved > > by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee. > > > > == Summary == > > A post-build step is added to the package build macros to > > automatically hardlink all identical files under `/usr`. Previously, > > this was done in some packages and now it's done everywhere by > > default. > > Almost every time I encounter a hard link, I think it wants to be a > reflink instead. And this is very much an example of this! > > Hardlinks are footguns. If you modify them, you get unexpected > results. (Yes, I know you're not supposed to modify a file that rpm > installed. People do it anyway.) If you are writing a tool that > modifies one copy of a pair of files that are actually hardlinks to > each other, you get awkward results. Even from a filesystem > implementation perspective, hardlinks are kind of gross, and if I were > designing a filesystem from scratch, I would probably not support > them, or at least not as a first-class feature. > > Other than the lack of rpm support, is there any good reason to use > hardlinks instead of reflinks? Reflinks actually do what one would > want here -- the act like two separate files (which is what the > package expects) but they share storage. >
Reflink support has long since been blocked on upstream progress on RPMCoW[1]. I really do wish this was further along, I really love this feature in CentOS Hyperscale. Indeed, I agree with you that reflinks are overall better and blend the attributes of hardlinks and symlinks to give a much better balance. [1]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/RPMCoW -- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth! -- _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
