We tried to handle hard-links correctly ~ten years ago in a backup tool and even back then it was "well obviously you have to use (dev, ino, gen), not just (dev

We tried to handle hard-links correctly ~ten years ago in a backup tool and even back then it was "well obviously you have to use (dev, ino, gen), not just (dev, ino), that's moronic!" and we're like... "so where do we get the generation number?". There actually was an ext4 ioctl to do so, but at least back then it was only implemented by ext4. IME it's a pretty consistent pattern with unixy/linux filesystems that what you can do with the normal APIs is wrong/incorrect/full of bugs and race conditions, while what you're "obviously supposed to do" instead is some absurd fs-specific concoction or just straight up isn't exposed by the kernel.