installworld failure due to cross-device links

[Kevin Oberman]

On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 6:18 AM, Matt Burke <mattblists at icritical.com> wrote:
> On 01/02/13 13:26, Nathan Whitehorn wrote:
>> Thanks for the patch! I've committed it (slightly modified) as r244958.
>> I haven't taken any action on the chgrp/chown issue, though.
>
> Similarly, 'make distribution' fails when /root is a separate filesystem:
>
> cd /usr/src/etc/root;  install -o root -g wheel -m 644  dot.profile
> /tmproot/root/.profile;  rm -f /tmproot/.profile;  ln
> /tmproot/root/.profile /tmproot/.profile
> ln: /tmproot/.profile: Cross-device link
> *** [distribution] Error code 1
>
> Is there any real advantage of hard links over symlinks nowadays?

Yes. In fact, hard links are essential for some purposes. Key
advantage of hard links is that you can create and use them as long as
needed and then just delete them. Any remaining hard links are
unaffected. When the last hard link is deleted, so is the file.

Symlinks, on the other hand are simply pointer to a real file and if
the file is deleted, the symlink remains, but is broken. Of course,
symlinks can cross file systems when hard links can't.

Both are likely to remain useful and neither is appropriate for all
applications.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
E-mail: kob6558 at gmail.com