Bug#642606: lintian - check for hardlinks in one directory
* Bastian Blank <waldi@debian.org>, 2011-09-24, 14:42:
btrfs, the newest filesystem supported by Linux, includes a limitation
of links to one file within one directory. This limit is, depending on
the length of the filenames, something between 100 and 200 names. As
dpkg makes a link as backup for every file first, the count needs to be
adjusted. git is one of the packages I found problematic, see #642603).
This limit comes from the fact that the current on-disk-format needs to
have all names for one file within a directory in one single tree page
(usually 4KiB). There are discussions about a fix, but it requires a
format change and is therefor rather low on the priority list.
Maybe lintian could check for this a bit.
According to my experiments, the limit is (approximately):
10n + s < 3900
where n is number of hardlinks and s is sum of length of filenames. If
we take upgrades into account, it becomes:
29n + 2s < 3900
(For git/1:1.7.7-1, it was n=106, s=1318, so the package was
installable, but not upgradable.)
--
Jakub Wilk
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