On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 5:26 PM, Neil Schemenauer <[email protected]> wrote: > Guido van Rossum <[email protected]> wrote: >> Does this need a pronouncement? Worrying about the speed of symlinks >> seems silly > > I agree. I wonder if a hard-link was used for legacy reasons. Some > very old versions of Unix didn't have symlinks. It looks like it > was introduced in BSD 4.2, released in 1983. That seems a long time > before the birth of Python but perhaps some SysV systems were around > that didn't have it. Also, maybe speed was more of a concern at > that time. In any case, those days are long, long gone.
Actually I remember what was my motivation at the time (somewhere between 1995-1999 I think) that I decided to use a hard link. It was some trick whereby if you ran "make install" the target binary, e.g. "python1.3", was removed and then overwritten in such a way that code which was running it via "python" (a hard link to python1.3) would not be disturbed. Then a new hard link would be created atomically. But it was too clever, and it's long been replaced with a symlink. Anyway, I don't think anyone is objecting against the PEP allowing symlinks now. -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido) _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com