2011/6/23 Duncan <1i5t5.dun...@cox.net>: > 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.
Yes, that's true. But it's also true that besides the symlinks, the portage tree will be broken the same moment you put it into a fat volume, because it will directly erase all the permissions and ownership metadata. So, the thing is already broken, why should we care if it breaks a bit more? Seriously, limiting ourselves because of an fs that not even MS uses any longer is not a smart thing to do, in my opinion. -- Jesús Guerrero Botella
