Tobias Weingartner wrote:

> Hmm, someone is gonna shoot me for this one.  Why do you want to make yet
> another special directory entry?  There is no point.  Saving disk accesses
> is what the cache is there for, let it do it's job.

Note that I am not a slavish advocate of either of the implementation
strategies under discussions. So you are not in my cross-hairs at all.

That said, a disk cache is also an optimization, which has its own
weaknesses. You can easily reduce the effectiveness of a cache by loading
it with unnecessary content. If you can keep symlinks in a directory
entry, then there is no need to have both the directory and a content
node in the cache. Said another way, it should be a more effective use
of the cache to have the name and the value in the same cache entry,
rather than the name in one entry and the value in another.

Whether you buy this or not seems to be a personal thing. My original
observation was intended to point out that there are other opinions,
all quite legitimate, on this issue.

/sjd