Re: hardlinks in packages -- unusable in AFS

[Joerg Sommer <joerg@alea.gnuu.de>]

Andrew Suffield <asuffield@debian.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 16, 2002 at 10:03:46PM +0000, Joerg Sommer wrote:
>> I have some packages (j2re1.3, libc6) they contain hardlinks in the
>> tarfile. But afs doesn't support hardlinks accross directories. So
>> installation of these packages fails. What can I do?
>> 
>> My only idea is, to install the package by hand in a normal directory and
>> copy the files into the afs.
>> 
>> dpkg --fsys-tarfile package.deb | tar x
>> 
>> But how can I set the state of the package to installed?
>> 
>> Or what is a better choise?
> 
> Fixing AFS.

?-) Do you know what's AFS? AFS couldn't support hardlinks across
directories, because it only have ACLs for directories.

I think I found a way: dpkg calls /bin/tar to extract the tar archive of
the debian package. So if a replace /bin/tar with a script, that calls
star -symlink, I can unpack the package the same way like in a normal fs.
But this script couldn't only call star, because star doesn't accept the
same parameters like tar. star whants -x -f instead of xf. And you
couldn't determine correctly, how calls the faked /bin/tar.

Is there a way to tell dpkg a tar command? So I can tell dpkg star with
-symlink as the tar command.

And calls dpkg tar for something else?

Joerg.