Use hard links

[torrentkino]

Hello,

I have an enhancement request:

Please use "hard links" while creating _site whenever possible. That is fast and does not need additional disk space. Tons of images and HTML5 videos could be "copied" to _site in no time.

Kind regards,
Aiko Barz

[parkr]

We do copy over static files and generate posts and pages in _site as you specify.

[parkr]

Perhaps you could clarify if you didn't mean this?

[torrentkino]

I meant, use
ln big_static_file.huge _site/big_static_file.huge
instead of
cp big_static_file.huge _site/big_static_file.huge

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_link

[parkr]

Oh, use symlinks! This is problematic when we use the site to deploy. Even doing a simple copy-with-my-ftp-client would most likely not be compatible with this feature. :-(

[torrentkino]

Actually, I did not mean a symlink. I meant a hardlink. :)

A symlink would be represented by:
ln -s big_static_file.huge _site/big_static_file.huge

[mattr-]

No, not symlinks either. Hardlinks are a totally different thing and — if I
remember correctly — work well with the whole copy-with-my-ftp-client use
case.

I think it's worth trying, at least for Unix based systems. I don't believe
Windows supports hard links

[maul-esel]

I don't believe Windows supports hard links

Im pretty sure it does.

[mattr-]

Awesome. I was not aware of this. I only knew about junctions. (not a windows expert, at all)

[mattr-]

@parkr @mojombo I think we should reopen this. The use of hard links would massively speed up site generation. Thoughts?

[parkr]

Seems like it'd be involved. Want to throw together a PR and put that up? I'm not sure it's worth the juggling, especially considering we're working on an incremental regeneration solution which will make regeneration even faster.

[ke352802081770314]

I have deployed jekyll recently, and very soon I was wondering why hardlinks are not used for assets, primarily due to disk space, but not having to lug many megabytes of data around would certainly speed up the build process too.
Incremental regeneration addresses build time, but the waste of space by systematically keeping all assets double on disk remains. Also incremental builds are not always a solution, if a site contains tag clouds, most recent posts and whatever in a sidebar of every page as is common in blogs, only a full generate will result in a consistent and appealing web presence.

Anyway, unfortunately I can't contribute any code as I don't speak ruby, so I can only make suggestions.
I verified by searching that ruby offers a "link" method for files which generates the hardlink: http://ruby-doc.org/core-1.9.3/File.html#method-c-link
It says it is not implemented on all platforms, which leaves it unclear whether it was implemented for Windows or not (yet).
Both on Unix and Windows, hard links only work within the same file system, so depending on the setting of the _config.yml item "destination", they may or may not work. So, the approach has to be:

if (file is an asset i.e. is to be placed in destination unprocessed)
try File.link(sourcefile, destinationfile)
if that didn't work, copy sourcefile to destinationfile (as before)

Needless to say, I would appreciate if implementing this could be reconsidered. Many thanks.