Bug#1010476: lintian: package-contains-hardlink has way too many false positives

[Helmut Grohne <helmut@subdivi.de>]

Package: lintian
Version: 2.114.0

Hi,

lintian emits the tag package-contains-hardlink in a lot of situations
where that tag is not reasonable. The referenced policy entry only
quires that conffiles are not hard linked. Beyond that, the tag
description reasons that hard links could cross mount points. While
directories such as /usr can be reasonable mount points, deeper
directories are not reasonable. Hard links that fully remain inside
/usr/share seem quite reasonable to me.

If you look at the tags emitted at
https://lintian.debian.org/tags/package-contains-hardlink, you'll notice
that the majority of them apply to deeply nested hierarchies - often
owned by the relevant package.

I suggest to weaken this check. A hard link is only reported if one of
the involved locations resides within /etc or if one of the top N
directory levels differ. The value of N is up to discussion. Quite
certainly N >= 1 and to be useful, we'd likely need N <= 3.

Helmut