Re: Cross-directory hard links in Debian packages

[Helmut Grohne <helmut@subdivi.de>]

On Wed, Nov 13, 2013 at 12:11:27PM +0100, Adam Borowski wrote:
> So you save a small number of inodes, and get problems if the filesystem's
> layout is unconventional.  Such savings don't seem to be worth the trouble
> to me.

I was questioning the existence of said trouble. I still do that. If the
number of affected users is small, then ignoring those few is a sensible
thing to do. For instance the publican package saved 3/4 of its binary
package size. If this were a problem, then maybe we should have seen a
bug report.

> You don't know what directory resides on what filesystem.  While splitting
> up /usr tends to be trouble, it is not unusual.  For example Maemo has:
> 
> /opt/pymaemo/usr/lib/python2.5 on /usr/lib/python2.5 type bind (bind,rbind)
> /opt/pymaemo/usr/share/pyshared on /usr/share/pyshared type bind (bind,rbind)
> /opt/pymaemo/usr/lib/pyshared on /usr/lib/pyshared type bind (bind,rbind)
> /opt/pymaemo/usr/share/python-support on /usr/share/python-support type bind (bind,rbind)
> /opt/pymaemo/usr/lib/python-support on /usr/lib/python-support type bind (bind,rbind)

These cases would not be problematic for my proposal. I was suggesting
to explicitly allow cross-directory hard links within any of these
locations, but not crossing each other.

> So I'd keep this requirement as is.

There is no requirement besides conffiles not being hard links. Having
hard links that cross /usr/share/pyshared and /usr/lib/pyshared is not a
policy violation.

Hence I was suggesting to clarify the policy on this aspect.

Helmut