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Re: dh_movefiles, tar vs. mv



Christoph Berg <cb@df7cb.de> schrieb:

> Re: Daniel Burrows in <[🔎] 200502251314.09459.dburrows@debian.org>
>>   I'd imagine that it doesn't use mv for the same reason "install" doesn't; 
>> ie, its purpose is to COPY files, not MOVE them.
>
> As I understood it, the question was about moving stuff from
> debian/tmp to debian/package. The stuff in debian/tmp should get
> removed by the clean target anyway, so it doesn't hurt to move instead
> of copying it.

Indeed. Especially when people tell me that dh_install is the successor
of dh_movefiles, which even has move in its name...

>>   Anyway, I thought you were joking in your first message, but it looks like 
>> you're serious, so I'll answer this time.  If you're copying between files on 
>> the same device, mv will use the rename(2) system call, which is an atomic 
>> operation: ie, it doesn't "copy" the source files at all, it just links them 
>> into the target directory.

That's why I want to use it. It would speed things up tremendously for
packages with lots of files that need to be separated into different
binary packages.

>> If you're copying between devices, mv will 
>> presumably copy the whole file before deleting it -- to actually remove a 
>> file "block-by-block" would mean a whole lot of totally pointless extra work 
>> in order to make the program less robust (there's no direct way to delete the 
>> first block of a file, so you'd have to either copy from the back or shift 
>> the whole file back a block at a time and then truncate it).
>
> I doubt that any subdirs of a package build directory will ever be on
> a different mount point than the directory itself ;-)

Correct. So, why not use mv?

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer



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