Use hard links instead of copying unprocessed files to the public directory #14392
Description
About the feature and problem
At the current state of Hugo, I have thousands of original images that get copied to /public every time I build the site. This is completely unnecessary and a waste of space on my PC. Since all the repo folders are usually on the same file system at build time, a hard link would be the perfect solution for most people and setups.
My setup:
Main PC (Arch Linux) → copy /public via rsync → NGINX webserver (Arch Linux)
About the proposed solution
This has already been discussed at #2245, but the issue is closed since 2022. However, there even was a proposed solution for the feature request:
--hardlinkA switch to use hard links for unmodified static files.
I really hope to see this simple feature added.