Bug#970234: consider dropping "No hard links in source packages"

[Helmut Grohne <helmut@subdivi.de>]

Hi cate,

On Mon, Oct 12, 2020 at 04:10:00PM +0200, Giacomo Catenazzi wrote:
> 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).

You appear to be talking about binary packages. This bug is about source
packages. When you unpack a source package, you are creating a directory
hiearchy rooted at the point where you start unpacking. There is not
possibly any reasonable way to split your source package into multiple
file systems. This is very different from binary packages where the
underlying hiearchy is shared with other packages and directories
frequently already exist.

> I think a hardlink on same directory should be fine, or within directories
> which must be on the same filesystem.

I argue that all files within a source package are always located on the
same filesystem, because the unpack step creates the source package root
directory on one file system and everything else resides on that very
filesystem.

For binary packages, restricting the use of symlinks makes a lot more
sense to me.

Helmut