MacPorts doesn't respect hard links during install phase

[julien.thewys@…]

Just installed macports and git-core on 10.5 . I can see that lots of generated bin are just the same file:

cd /opt/local/bin;
for i in git-*; do diff -qs $i git-tag; done | grep identical | wc

Some "cp" could be replaced by "ln" in the build process.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

Assign/Cc maintainers.

[blb@…]

git-core does use hard links in the destroot, so the issue is actually with MacPorts base. It currently doesn't look for hard links when going from destroot to install, hence each file is then copied instead of hard linked.

The question is how easy/difficult it would be to detect hard linked files in Tcl, since 'file type' appears to only return 'link' which is a symlink, and 'file' for hard links (since it looks like a file).

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

I thought that was the point of hard links -- that they are indistinguishable from real files. So there's no way for base to fix this.

So isn't the fix for the for git-core to install those files as symlinks instead of hard links?