Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: [arch-users] advanced usage advice: the prism technique (fwd)

[Florian Weimer]

On Fri, Sep 26, 2003 at 11:47:05PM +0200, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:

> So now the only thing I care for efficient operation is that I can cache
> the unpacked tree in unpacked form (and I believe it's already the
> case), and that every new tree I checkout with 'get' gets forked sharing
> the inode with an _hardlink_.

I wouldn't want to share the reference tree (be it a pristine tree or in
a revision library) with my working copy.  I'd view this as just too
dangerous.  Arch could generate wrong patches or change files way back
into the history of the project.

On the other hand, if you want to share project trees, which are
essentially unrelated in terms of arch, it's probably better to use an
external tool to hard-link files with identical content.  I have some
ideas for speeding up such a tool by caching (in fact I've recently
written something quite similar for my maildir folders).  This would
still result in full-tree copies if you use certain merging methods
(probably just "update"), but otherwise, it should come pretty close to
what you want.

Or am I missing something?