On Fri, 23 Apr 1999, Greg A. Woods wrote:

: > 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?

I'm talking about files shipped in the binary *sets*.  I can set symlinks if
I build from source, but I'm not about to build from source on all the
machines I administer.

: 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)

Doing that for hard-links from a binary set is more difficult than renaming
the targets and names of symlinks.  Symlinks need only a little awk magic
whereas matching up hard links is much more difficult.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling (Personal tv@pobox.com; Bus. todd_vierling@xn.xerox.com)