On Tue, 19 Dec 1995, Missing - presumed fed. wrote:

> That's all well and good, but you can't union mount over NFS, which
> apparently some people must do if they can't afford local disk space
> (for whatever reason).
> 
	You can - if union mounts were changed to not require whiteouts.
	You would not be able to remove a file that existed in the lower
	layer - but that would be fine for this situation.
	mount_union should take an option to mount the upper layer without
	whiteouts (default behaviour would be as now of course).
	
	the only argument I've seen against this is that 'unlink() failing
	is counterintuative' - but you would _only_ get this behaviour
	if you specified the flag, and then you're prepared to have it in
	order to get it to work!

> Sometimes symlinks are a necessary evil.  I usually avoid them myself,
> especially if building a system from scratch.  However, there are
> some things which cannot be avoided.  Symlinks in the case of an NFS-
> mounted build tree are one of them.
> 
	better functionality in union mounts would remove the need for that
	evil.

> Besides that:  How many union mounts must one then have?  Isn't there
> an upper limit to mounted filesystems somewhere?  Or is that just FFS
> mounts?

	pass :)

		  David/abs 		(david@southern.com)

+44 181 888 8949 System Manager, Southern Studios Ltd, Box 59, London N22 1AR
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