Re: Hamm Bug Stamp-Out List for June 25, 1998

[Dale Scheetz <dwarf@polaris.net>]

On 26 Jun 1998, Manoj Srivastava wrote:

> Hi,
> >>"Bdale" == Bdale Garbee <bdale@gag.com> writes:
> 
> 
>  Bdale> If you're working in a multi-machine networked environment,
>  Bdale> and are accessing another system using NFS (particularly with
>  Bdale> an automounted host map), an absolute link can easily violate
>  Bdale> "the principle of least astonishment"...  if you are tracking
>  Bdale> down a remote machine's filesystems, and cross an absolute
>  Bdale> symbolic link, you're back on your local system's filesystem!
>  Bdale> That's almost never what you meant, or what you wanted.
> 
> 	On the other hand, if you are using automount, or AFS, or DFS,
>  or even, in some environments, NFS, you may keep all mounts
>  under, say, /mnt (eg /usr -> /mnt/i386/usr), in which case, any
>  relative links between top level directories loose. 
> 
> 	In this case, a relative symlink also violates the princple of
>  least astonishment, and indeed, does not even work.
> 
> 	I think, on balance, the policy works for the most common
>  case. 
> 
> 	manoj
> 

Thanks for quoting Policy on this. Upon reading the "actual" text, I don't
think this policy applies to libc6-dev.

> 
> 3.3.5. Symbolic links
> ---------------------
> 
>      In general, symbolic links within a toplevel directory should be
>      relative, and symbolic links pointing from one toplevel directory into
>      another should be absolute. (A toplevel directory is a sub-directory
>      of the root directory `/'.)

Note: "from one toplevel directory into another"

The links are from /usr/lib, which is a subdirectory of a top level
directory. Yes, it points to a top level directory, but that only satifies
one half of the above criterion.
 
> 
>      In addition, symbolic links should be specified as short as possible,
>      i.e., link targets like `foo/../bar' are depreciated.

I guess I'm just stupid ;-) but I don't understand what the example is
trying to tell me.

Waiting is, 

Dwarf
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