From owner-freebsd-stable Sat Jan 27 21:20: 1 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from ece.cmu.edu (ECE.CMU.EDU [128.2.236.200]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9B84C37B400 for ; Sat, 27 Jan 2001 21:19:42 -0800 (PST) Received: from pyanfar.ece.cmu.edu (53541n@PYANFAR.REM.CMU.EDU [128.2.87.225]) by ece.cmu.edu (8.11.0/8.10.2) with ESMTP id f0S5JAZ00768; Sun, 28 Jan 2001 00:19:11 -0500 (EST) Date: Sun, 28 Jan 2001 00:19:09 -0500 From: "Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH" To: james@m-a.net Cc: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Buildworld failure using two disks Message-ID: <181490000.980659149@pyanfar.ece.cmu.edu> In-Reply-To: <20010127220340.A294@dionysos.yi.org> X-Mailer: Mulberry/2.0.6b3 (Linux/x86) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Saturday, January 27, 2001 22:03:40 -0700, Dionysos wrote: +----- | > ....but they cannot be created *on* msdos filesystems because the | filesystem > doesn't know about them. Which, if I've been following | this correctly, is > what was happening. | > | You would definitely be following correctly. Granted I didn't do any | kind of scientific analysis of this to be sure that this was exactly what | was tripping me up, but it makes a bit more sense that one can't write | symbolic links across differently formatted file systems. +---->8 You're not quite understanding. Symlinks can point to anything; as far as the VFS is concerned, it's just a new filesystem path to follow. The problem is that the msdos filesystem itself doesn't know how to store a filesystem object of type "symlink". In fact, the semantics of the msdos filesystem are so different from those of Unix-style filesystems (ufs, ext2, etc.) that I would have expected more things to fail than just symlinking: filenames which differ only in case will collide with each other, and it can't store any kind of filesystem object other than a regular file or a directory (i.e. not only do symlinks lose, so do fifos, sockets, and character and block devices... not that any of those would be put into /usr/obj.) The lesson of this is: don't put /usr/obj on a non-unix-like filesystem. ufs and ext2fs are the safe ones to use. -- brandon s. allbery [os/2][linux][solaris][japh] allbery@kf8nh.apk.net system administrator [WAY too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering KF8NH carnegie mellon university ["better check the oblivious first" -ke6sls] To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message