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colinw wrote:I can live with that, it should also allow it to work with existing filesystems, i'll see what I can do.

I can't, I just did some tests and here is a simple example of something you broke with your soft link changes:
3.sfs2:> makedir a
3.sfs2:> cd a
3.sfs2:a> echo test > b
3.sfs2:a> makelink soft c b
3.sfs2:a> type c
test
3.sfs2:a> /
3.sfs2:> rename a d
3.sfs2:> cd d
3.sfs2:d> type c
TYPE: Konnte Eingabedatei "c" nicht oeffnen.
TYPE: Objekt nicht gefunden
3.sfs2:d>


If you change "dhx:foo/bar" to ":foo/bar" I could copy directories with soft links, for example GCC: or SDK:, to other partitions again (even if only if I copy everything), but I still can't move them around inside the same partition.

Slayer wrote:1) does converting softlinks into actual files cause problems AND

Yes. If the "mother" file is updated (e.g. a new version of an .so is installed), the previous links (now independent files) which were expected to give access to the same file, are now accessing (or rather are themselves) an obsolete version.

2) is there more to softlinks than saving space

Yes, it's a matter of being able to access a particular file under different names and making sure it's (physically) the same file.

Best regards,

Niels

@joerg

I can't, I just did some tests and here is a simple example of something you broke with your soft link changes:

In simple terms: If you rename a directory that contains soft links to files in the same directory, the links are broken when they must be absolute links.

I can't live with that either. We were better off with the links the way they were. The user has a choice of whether to use relative or absolute soft links and backing up partitions with ASyncWB worked.

I don't use Linux but I wonder if it has the same problems with links.

@joerg
As long as we're on the subject of link issues, there is a strange difference between FFS and SFS2 when it comes to links on write protected partitions. If you create a directory soft link on an FFS partition to a directory on another partition and then write protect the FFS partition (lock command), you can copy files to the directory link. Of course the files are actually written to the linked (target) directory. If you create the directory link on an SFS2 partiton and write protect it, you can't copy files to the directory link. You will get a "Volume write-protected" AmigaDOS requester instead. It's not a big problem but I just wonder why it works that way.

As I said before, filesystems are not all the same. They were all written by different people, in the days before we wrote down the specification of how an Amiga FS has to work. None of the old filesystems has been upgraded to meet that specification, nor is likely to be.

I apologise for misleading you earlier. I knew that some things had changed, but I believed that none of the changes had been released yet.

That 'surprisingly' make perfect exact sense

Thank you Niels