Jesús J. Guerrero Botella posted on Thu, 23 Jun 2011 08:15:44 +0200 as excerpted:
> Symlinks are clean, and portage has always been file-oriented so I see > no problem with using them for this. It has been some years since I've seen the argument made, but if I'm not mistaken, at least back in 2004-ish when I first switched to Gentoo, the argument against in-tree symlinking (or multi-hard-linking, for that matter) of any kind (other than the obvious directory hard-linking) was that we wanted to keep the tree at least minimally deployable on non-Unix filesystems like fat/ntfs. Note that while a user's profile uses a symlink, the symlink is on /etc (which is thus implied to be a Unix filesystem with symlinking capacities) pointing /into/ the tree, NOT actually PART OF the tree. One scenario in which this might be a factor is that of someone doing their syncs and source downloads at work where they have lots of bandwidth available, then sneakernetting it home on a fat32 formatted thumbdrive. Now it can be argued that the flexibility benefit of multi-category packages trumps that of being able to put the tree on fat or whatever, but there IS a definite loss of tree portability that's implied, and thus a tradeoff to be considered. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
