Subject: Re: bug#42620: hard link improvement for gzip (wishlist item)

From: Harald Dunkel <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 31 Jul 2020 08:26:05 +0200

Looking at a file with n references by hard links:

n=1 is the trivial case. No changes needed.

All involved directories are read-only: Another trivial case
to be ignored here.

For n>1:

I would suggest that the file is compressed and the directory
entries are adjusted accordingly, if the directories can be
written.

If some directories are read-only, then you end up with 2 files,
the new compressed file and the old original still referenced
in the read-only directories.

The workaround for compressing a file with several references
in the file system is *very* ugly, even if you know all paths
pointing to it. And the need for compressing such a file comes
up especially for large files, i.e. those files that are
efficient to compress, but not easy to copy. Rotated log files
with a size of a few GBytes, for example.

Its just a suggestion, of course. Keep on your good work

Harri