Re: [PATCH] Makefile: add a knob to turn off hardlinks within same directory

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Oct 12, 2011, 19:02 UTC
Message-ID: <7vaa969go4.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20111012083842.GA21969@elie.hsd1.il.comcast.net>

Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:

Show 28 quoted lines

> Typically someone using this setting would want to set
> NO_CROSS_DIRECTORY_HARDLINKS, too, but that is not enforced, so you
> can make $(bindir)/git and $(gitexecdir)/git into hardlinks to the
> same inode and still make sure your tarball avoids the btrfs limits if
> you want.
>
> Requested-by: Bastian Blank <waldi@debian.org>
> Signed-off-by: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
> ---
> Hi,
>
> See <http://bugs.debian.org/642603> for context.  Sane?
>
>  Makefile |    7 +++++++
>  1 files changed, 7 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
>
> diff --git a/Makefile b/Makefile
> index 9afdcf2a..ab64ff4c 100644
> --- a/Makefile
> +++ b/Makefile
> @@ -226,6 +226,10 @@ all::
>  # Define NO_CROSS_DIRECTORY_HARDLINKS if you plan to distribute the installed
>  # programs as a tar, where bin/ and libexec/ might be on different file systems.
>  #
> +# Define NO_HARDLINKS if you plan to distribute the installed programs as a tar
> +# that might be extracted on a filesystem like btrfs that does not cope well
> +# with many links to one inode in one directory.
> +#

Hmm.... I would understand if the change were to eventually remove these "git-foo" anywhere from the filesystem perhaps after a large version bump in Git 2.0, but that is not what you are trying to do.

Wouldn't your use case be better served with

    $ tar zcf dist.tar.gz --hard-dereference $list_of_files_to_tar_up

instead?