[Python-Dev] [PEPs] Rebooting PEP 394 (aka Support the /usr/bin/python2 symlink upstream) (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Sun Jul 24 23:16:55 CEST 2011

On Wed, 20 Jul 2011 01:53:09 -0500 Kerrick Staley <mail at kerrickstaley.com> wrote:

On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 3:03 AM, Ned Deily <nad at acm.org> wrote: > I think adding the requirement to mandate hard link vs soft link usage > is an unnecessary and unwarranted attempt at optimization. For > instance, IIRC, the OS X installers don't use any hard links: that may > complicate the install, plus hard links on OS X HFS* file systems are a > bit of a kludge and not necessarily more efficient than symlinks. It's > not a big deal but perhaps the wording should be changed to make a > suggestion about hard links vs syminks rather than mandate which should > be used.

Ah, OK. The wording's been changed so that symbolic links will be installed on Mac OS X and hard links elsewhere (although maybe symbolic links are also better on certain other platforms; I'm not sure). I do think that specific instructions must be given (rather than just a suggestion) because it's indicating what must be done to CPython. The instructions should be as close as possible to what the installer already does, but I'm not entirely sure what the installer does by default, and the hard-link recommendation was based off a cursory inspection of my own system, so further input from yourself and the rest of python-dev would be appreciated.

I think the recommendation should be symbolic links for all systems. Hard links are generally harder to discover, while it is trivial to find out that a given file is a symbolink link, and to which other file. The optimization is probably not useful in the real world (our executables are relatively small, and people worried about a couple of megabytes can always go for the shared library option).

Regards

Antoine.

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