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Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 18:10:59 -0500 (EST)
From: Alexander Viro <viro@math.psu.edu>
To: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>
cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [BUG] Inconsistent behaviour of rmdir
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On 16 Nov 2000, H. Peter Anvin wrote:

[hardlinks on directories]

> I don't believe it's inherently impossible in Linux anymore.  In fact,

Yes, it is. bindings are asymmetrical. And that's the reason why they
work while links to directories do not. 

> vfsbinds provide a lot of the same kind of functionality; the main
> difference between vfsbinds and hard links are that the former (a) can
> cross filesystem boundaries and (b) aren't persistent.

Here's one more: you can't rename across the binding boundary. They _are_
mounts, so they avoid all that crap with loop creation on rename, etc.
Take a generic DAG and try to implement rename() analog on it. Have fun
catching the cases that would make the graph disconnected.

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