On Wed, Nov 13, 2013 at 10:19:17AM +0100, Helmut Grohne wrote: > While same-directory hard links are an established practise, > the same is not so true for cross-directory hard links. > > A good reason to use hard links is to save space. There are a number of > packages that ship the same content in multiple locations. The > alternative, soft links, has the downside of consuming inodes. When a > package ships very many duplicate small files, the savings for using > soft links are small compared to the savings achievable with hard links.
So you save a small number of inodes, and get problems if the filesystem's layout is unconventional. Such savings don't seem to be worth the trouble to me. > Clearly, packages must not use hard links across usual mount locations > such as /usr. Unpacking a package with a hard link across different > filesystems simply fails with an error from tar. You don't know what directory resides on what filesystem. While splitting up /usr tends to be trouble, it is not unusual. For example Maemo has: /opt/pymaemo/usr/lib/python2.5 on /usr/lib/python2.5 type bind (bind,rbind) /opt/pymaemo/usr/share/pyshared on /usr/share/pyshared type bind (bind,rbind) /opt/pymaemo/usr/lib/pyshared on /usr/lib/pyshared type bind (bind,rbind) /opt/pymaemo/usr/share/python-support on /usr/share/python-support type bind (bind,rbind) /opt/pymaemo/usr/lib/python-support on /usr/lib/python-support type bind (bind,rbind) So I'd keep this requirement as is. -- A tit a day keeps the vet away. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20131113111127.ga24...@angband.pl
