Re: Relative and absolute symlinks
* Lionel Elie Mamane <lionel@mamane.lu> [2008-08-15 16:47:41 CEST]:
> (Further discussion should happen on debian-policy@l.d.o, but please
> CC me.)
Same with me, I plan to scan the archives of the list, but am not
subscribed.
> 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.
The story was raised for me by different users of the wesnoth package.
People seem to move at least their /usr/games section to some other
place and symlink it because of its size. I also am aware that there are
people doing the same for /var/spool. In general my suggestion was to at
least allow /usr/* and /var/* symlinks to be absolute between different
hierarchies in there instead of putting the weight of a should in there.
Rationale being that the structure within /usr and /var is quite split
up and it does make sense to allow people to do the same stuff with
direct root directories without any pains.
> 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?
Quite some times I experienced them to be more pain than gain, too. It
might be useful if people shift around complete hierarchies, but we are
not really speaking of package-internal symlinks here usually.
Thanks,
Rhonda
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