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From: v892231@si.hhs.nl (Edvard Tuinder)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Symbolic links for 1.5 PC
Message-ID: <56346@nigel.ee.udel.edu>
Date: 14 Jun 91 18:08:27 GMT
Sender: root@ee.udel.edu
Lines: 31

In article <9106132139.AA03262@mcsun.EU.net> rommel@INFORMATIK.TU-MUENCHEN.DE (Kai-Uwe Rommel) writes:
> 
> I got the symlink package from an archive and found that it did not work
> with Minix 1.5 for the PC. I spend several evenings to fix it and finally
> got it working. All changes are now diffs, no complete files are posted
> any more, except for the three new system call hooks for the library.
> 
> I have changed a lot because apparently the current 1.5.10 has a lot of
> differences to 1.5.2 for which Fred van Kempen wrote that he has tested
> this package with in the README file.

I have taken a quick look at the sources and I noticed that this implementation
still stuffs all the symlink info into the inode. This is rather tricky.
At MUG-NET we have also taken Ken Staileys Symlinks, but we have changed it
to be almost completely identical to the BSD-symlinks. This means that for each
symbolic link, a file is allocated in which the information is written.
By doing this, the inode is still free for storing the information it normally 
holds. It also requires less changes to the user programs, since nothing 
really changed in the filesystem, except that there is a new filetype, I_SLNK.

The implementation is now going through a beta-test, cause there are still
some tiny bugs with fsck and rm'd files. When this problem is fixed, we 
could send out the cdiff's for this implementation, but we will probably 
wait for 1.6 to be released to the net (and running steady :-).

							Edvard
___________________________________________________________________________
Edvard Tuinder             | internet: v892231@si.hhs.nl
Student Computer Science   |           edvard@bbltv.nl.mugnet.org
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