Re: Can't hardlink in different dirs. (BUG#826)

Jan Harkes (jaharkes@cs.cmu.edu)
Fri, 3 Dec 1999 12:50:24 -0500

On Fri, Dec 03, 1999 at 12:18:19PM -0500, Alexander Viro wrote:
> On Fri, 3 Dec 1999, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
>
> > I don't like having only coda breaking the semantic. You'll end getting
> > reports of "program X doesn't work with coda, why?". If you'll break the
> > semantic in the VFS the program will be fixed ASAP and you'll never get
> > the report in the middle of a stable kernel.
>
> Or somebody will break your legs and patch will be reversed... Besides,
> "foo doesn't work with CODA" has a simple answer: don't use foo on CODA.
> Andrea, you _do_ realize that CODA is not a Linux-only thing? So it's
> either different semantics on Linux and everything else _or_ doing that in
> CODA anyway.

Actually, currently we return EXDEV on all cross directory hardlinks,
and there have not been many programs that care. A program should expect
this as it is always possible that the destination directory is located
in another filesystem.

When we would allow links within the same Coda-volume, we will ofcourse
use Peter's policy suggestion as it does fit closely with Coda's
permission model which is based on directory ACLs. But we will still be
returning EXDEV whenever someone tries to link a file into a directory
located on a different volume, as that volume could be located on
different servers.

I would prefer to see applications handle the error correctly. This is
actually one of the normal errors to expect when calling link(2) in the
first place.

Jan

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