On 13.09.2020 12:52, Helmut Grohne wrote:
Package: debian-policy Version: 4.5.0.3 Severity: wishlist Jakub stumbled into the "No hard links in source packages" requirement added around 1996 and couldn't make sense of it. Neither could Christoph nor myself. tar does support hard links just fine. lintian does not check this property. sugar-log-activity/38 is an example package violating the property. It is shipped in buster and technically rc-buggy though no bug is filed about it. I believe that the requriement needs a rationale. Failing that, it should be dropped.
The rationale was probably similar so symlinks: they may fail across different filesystems, and we supported to have e.g. / /usr /usr/share /usr/local /var (and various /var/*) /home /tmp /boot etc on different file systems. Now we are more strict on where we can split filesystems (and disk are larger, and LVM simplified much of filesystem handling).
I think a hardlink on same directory should be fine, or within directories which must be on the same filesystem.
ciao cate[for symlinks we have the problem with relative links (containing "../") passing filesystem boundaries]