[Info-vax] Hard links on VMS ODS5 disks

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2023-07-16 20:30, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 7/16/2023 2:28 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> The two cost are hardware and peoples time.
>>
>> With todays TB disks it is very unlikely that having two copies of some
>> executables will require buying bigger and more expensive disk(s).
>>
>> Having developer support the name test logic on multiple platforms
>> and having sys admins needing to worry about linked stuff
>> when they clean up is a very small effort but still an
>> effort greater than zero.
> 
> And just to make sure we are talking about the same.

[...]

Yes. And my point is that this detail is there no matter what. So you 
didn't "save" anything by having two binaries. Since it's actually just 
one binary, and how it behaves is based on which name it was invoked as.

Yes, you *could* have different binaries, with the different behaviors, 
and not have to deal with all this.

But that was not what was going on here. The binary we are talking about 
still have this logic you are hinting at. It's just that in addition to 
that engineering work, which seems to be your concern, it also uses up 
twice the space (or even more, depending on how many copies of the 
program you happen to install).

I feel like you didn't get the point that the decision on what the 
program should do based on under what name it was invoked was not absent 
with these multiple copies... It is still there, and still made use of.

Sure disk space is cheap and all that. But in this case, it's really 
questionable why not have a hard link. Even at a fraction of a cents 
difference in cost, it's still not zero, and bad behavior should really 
not be propagated. Sooner or later a small problem becomes a bigger problem.

   Johnny