What kind of things would you want in the GNU OS

[Barry Shein]

Re: Symbolic Links...

Also note that some vendors (eg. Encore) will store a symlink pathname
directly into the inode if it will fit (I think the cut-off was 63
chars which isn't too sleazy, I never measured the hit rate tho I
could easily I guess.) This means that getting the symlink path
requires no extra disk accesses tho chasing down the result of course
costs the same.

The moral is: before you condemn a feature just for being
non-performant make sure the implementation can't be improved.

It would also be interesting to measure these things people claim are
unacceptably non-performant. With all the caches etc I wouldn't trust
people's intuitions, they might be complaining about nothing (ok, in
certain real-time environments every cycle counts, but I doubt their
problems are solved by merely avoiding symlinks, sounds like a red
herring, and yes, I've done a fair amount of real-time stuff, in Unix
even!)
-- 
	-Barry Shein

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