Bug#22935: PROPOSED] Do not make hardlinks to conffiles

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

On Sun, 30 May 1999, Julian Gilbey wrote:

> > Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es> wrote:
> > > If not, should we clearly write in policy that hardlinks to conffiles
> > > should be avoided wherever possible?
> 
> Please could someone enlighten me about this proposal?

Some time ago I discovered how bad dpkg handled hardlinks to conffiles in
one of the packages I maintain, smartlist.

If you create a list "foo", it will have a file in /var/list/foo/rc.submit
which is just a hardlink to /var/list/.etc/rc.submit.

However, if you change /var/list/.etc/rc.submit, and upgrade the package
using dpkg, it is likely that /var/list/foo/rc.submit becomes hardlinked
to /var/list/.etc/rc.submit.dpkg-old, usually not what you would expect.

[ So I changed smartlist so that it used symlinks and not hardlinks ].

I asked in debian-devel "Is this a dpkg bug or it is just that
hardlinks to conffiles should be forbidden by policy?"

and then Ian Jackson reported this as a bug against policy.

If you want to make a nicely worded proposal from this (currently
informal) bug, I will surely second it, and I assume Ian Jackson would
too.

Thanks.

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