Re: Relative and absolute symlinks
On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 09:57:58AM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> Rhonda made the suggestion that we allow absolute links /usr/*
> and /var/* symlinks to be absolute between different hierarchies, since
> these hierarchies are often the target of relocation-via-symlinking.
> A suggestion was made that links in the /usr/share/doc/
> hierarchy could remain relative (/usr/share/doc/bash-doc/examples ->
> ../bash/examples, perhaps for the reason that people are unlikely to
> move just one directory out of /usr/share/doc/ via symlinks, and we
> might as well not break case 2 for folks.
> I think case 1 is more important than case 2, since the latter
> is a convenience and useful for remote admin, but case 1 helps out the
> local machine, and is often a godsend in critical nearly out of disk
> space on important server situation.
> Do we have consensus that a:
> a) links that do not climb directory trees should be encouraged to be
> relative (do not break case 2)
> b) subdirectories of /var/*/ and /usr/* should be treated as top level
> directories for the purposes of the relative/absolute symlink rule:
> any links that climbs out of /usr/foo/bar or /var/foo/bar should be
> absolute, and the rest of the current rule stays in place?
I agree that this is reasonable. I think that b) is fairly unnecessary
anymore because of bind mounts, but I think it's logically consistent with
the existing policy if we draw the line there.
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/
slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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