Re: [9fans] mv vs cp

[George Michaelson <ggm@apnic.net>]

> path.  Even on pre-7th Edition Unix, it was fairly easy to make
> a cyclic structure using (hard) links.  But tree-walking has
> been common and useful for decades despite those opportunities
> for cyclic behavior.

Surely hard links couldn't point to directories, so it was only about
alternate paths to leaf objects. Thats not the same as a GOTO loop.

> 
> As the WWW has shown, structures don't have to be perfect to
> be very useful.  We're still waiting for Xanadu..

I entirely agree. I think that symlinks can be viewed as runtime
evaluated conditionals in the filespace. That it means perfoming
more work than traversing the hard link is true. That it lets
you perform a large number of tasks that want to walk into partitioned
spaces it also true I think. 

That the only extant implementation has severe flaws and inconsistencies
is a damn shame.

Didn't the guys one stack down on the shoulders of the giants decide to
walk away from symlinks because it was hard to get right, more than
because  philosophically they were 'wrong'? Unlike with dead physicists,
we get to ask these questions and sometimes get answers more than conjecture.

-George