Helmut Grohne <hel...@subdivi.de> writes: > 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. I'm inclined to agree with you on this, but it's probably worth mentioning somewhere in this bug that the AFS file system is still used and still, so far as I know, does not support cross-directory hard links because of its per-directory ACL system. I'm not sure what tar does in this situation: whether it fails or whether it just silently duplicates the file. I'm not sure that we care, but that sort of concern (along with a general dislike of hard links) is probably the original rationale. The fact that this has gone unnoticed in a source package in an existing release makes a pretty strong argument that nothing in Debian cares and we should just remove the constraint. Sam Hartman <hartm...@debian.org> writes: > I think that hard links in a source package are fine provided that > breaking the hard links would not either break the build or provide an > unreasonable space multiplier. I agree with you that those would be undesirable properties, but are they likely and important enough to have it be worth retaining a section talking about this, as opposed to using the "not every bug is a Policy violation" rule? We do pay a (small) complexity cost for each additional requirement we put in Policy, so I'm tempted to just drop this entirely and bank the complexity reduction. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
