In article <23989.807828100@austin>, Tobias Weingartner <weingart@austin.BrandonU.CA> writes:
> Also, kludging up the directory structure makes no sense to me.  Why
> do you want to hack up something beautifull?  Why masacre (sp?) a
> thing of simplicity, flexibility and function?  For speed?  Gimme a
> break, a quick check of a machine running NetBSD-1.0a/i386, shows
> that there are 676 sym-links, of which the X11R6 installation is
> using 618, which leaves ~60 for the rest of the system.

A quick check of a machine running NetBSD-1.0/i386 shows that there
are 26927 symlinks.  Speed is definitely wanted for symlinks :-).

Okay, I'll admit that the setup is probably a bit exotic :-) The
machine is running a locally developed SW package management system
called `store'.  Store keeps each package in a separate directory,
either locally on the client or on a store server.  Each client then
has a (sym)linktree with links pointing from
/store/{bin,lib,share,...} on the client machine to the appropriate
package files, either to a local copy or to automounted file systems
on the servers.  (Some witty soul decided that `symlink hell' was a
more appropriate name ....)  Despite the number of symlinks it works
quite well, simultanously handling a variety of processor
architecture/OS combinations as well as different versions of the
packages.  For those out there with a thoroughly perverted mindset
http://www.pvv.unit.no/~arnej/store/storedoc.html should provide more
info.

Anyway, this posting is meant as a data point for symlink usage (and
maybe a small plug for store :-).  I expect the data point to be
somewhere in the high end of the scale :-)

					-jarle
-- 
"Punning is the worst vice. There is no vice versa."