Ansgar Burchardt <ans...@debian.org> writes: > It seems strange to treat top-level directories differently: why > should /usr be allowed to be a symlink, but /usr/local, /usr/lib or > /usr/share/doc not? I can't come up with a better idea than that > top-level directories are something like "driver letters".
I think the rationale was just that it was more common to move top-level directories to another drive with more space than it was to muck about below the top level. I'm not sure we document that difference anywhere useful for the user, though. > So I suggest to either: > (a) require *all* symlinks to be relative > (b) forbid using '..' in symlinks Personally, I prefer (b) -- I think relative symlinks that ascend out of a directory are a questionable pattern in general. But this is a very large change that would affect a lot of packages (admittedly, in a way that could mostly be cleaned up by debhelper), and is also a pretty significant break with past practice that will probably break some system out there in some way. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
