[ On Friday, April 23, 1999 at 15:31:07 (-0400), Todd Vierling wrote: ]
> Subject: man links: hard/symbolic
>
> So it seems that the man pages in the sets use hard links, not symbolic
> links, to link man pages that share text.  This has a big drawback:  it
> makes compressing the shipped man pages nearly impossible without *lots* of
> funny work.

What exactly is difficult about it?  How much is "*lots*"?  Isn't the
compression done before the installation and linking?  Shouldn't it be
if not?  Wouldn't it be best to do so anyway even if you used symlinks,
because if you try to do the compression afterwards you still have to
search out and update all the symlinks (about the same difficulty as
renaming all hard-links, I'd say), don't you?

> I'd like to propose a switch to symlinks by default, possibly for 1.4 but
> I'm not holding my breath on that.

I think I'd prefer to keep the hard links.  Either that or "go back" to
using ".so" instead of any kind of links.  It's awfully hard to screw up
anything with ".so" copies if you suddenly want to give a particular
copy its own unique text at some point.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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