Relative and absolute symlinks

[Lionel Elie Mamane <lionel@mamane.lu>]

(Further discussion should happen on debian-policy@l.d.o, but please
CC me.)

During Manoj's "policy" talk at DebConf8, Gerfried opened the subject
of the policy's stand on relative and absolute symlinks, which
currently is "absolute if going through top-level, relative
otherwise".

I wanted to give another data-point: Mailman switched its intra-/var/
symlinks to be absolute, because relative symlinks there broke setups
of people that "moved" their /var/lib/mailman/ directory to another
partition, not through mounting, but through replacing their
/var/lib/mailman/ directory by a symlink to elsewhere -
e.g. /u/mailman . This broke e.g. relative symlinks
/var/lib/mailman/log to ../../logs/mailman. Bugs #413604 and #408855
contain the whole story.

As policy doesn't technically *mandate* relative symlinks, but says
"in general", we felt we could deviate from our own initiative.

I must say I don't quite see in what scenario relative symlinks make
something work that absolute symlinks do not make work.

So, is there any reason at all to use relative symlinks?

-- 
Lionel