Most git executables are hard links to git.exe?

[Andrey Repin]

Greetings, Jim Garrison via Cygwin!

> On 07/21/23 14:52, Brian Inglis wrote:
>> On 2023-07-21 14:59, Jim Garrison via Cygwin wrote:
>>> Git comes with over 100 executables, mostly in /usr/libexec/git-core,
>>> that all appear to be *hard* links to /bin/git, in both Cygwin and
>>> Windows. The Windows fsutil command shows they're all hard linked:
> [snip]
>>> I'm curious to know if there's a specific reason for this implementation
>>> that would make it the choice over symbolic links.
>> > For the same reason you are complaining about backups not taking > hardlinks into account: to avoid distributing 400MB instead of 3MB.
>> > Cygwin backup utilities should be able to deal with these e.g. rsync -H, > --hard-links, although it appears xcopy and robocopy may not under > Windows 10; don't know about other utilities or Windows 11.

> But why not use symbolic links to accomplish the same thing?

Adding to the bullet list:
cmd's handling of symbolik links is such that given a symlink path, it would
actually execute the symlink target, thoroughly ruining the executable name
and associated CWD. Making them unusable as command processors in general.


-- 
With best regards,
Andrey Repin
Monday, July 31, 2023 16:33:49

Sorry for my terrible english...