* Lionel Elie Mamane <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2008-08-15 16:47:41 CEST]: > (Further discussion should happen on [EMAIL PROTECTED], but please > CC me.)
Same with me, I plan to scan the archives of the list, but am not subscribed. > During Manoj's "policy" talk at DebConf8, Gerfried opened the subject > of the policy's stand on relative and absolute symlinks, which > currently is "absolute if going through top-level, relative > otherwise". > > I wanted to give another data-point: Mailman switched its intra-/var/ > symlinks to be absolute, because relative symlinks there broke setups > of people that "moved" their /var/lib/mailman/ directory to another > partition, not through mounting, but through replacing their > /var/lib/mailman/ directory by a symlink to elsewhere - > e.g. /u/mailman . This broke e.g. relative symlinks > /var/lib/mailman/log to ../../logs/mailman. Bugs #413604 and #408855 > contain the whole story. The story was raised for me by different users of the wesnoth package. People seem to move at least their /usr/games section to some other place and symlink it because of its size. I also am aware that there are people doing the same for /var/spool. In general my suggestion was to at least allow /usr/* and /var/* symlinks to be absolute between different hierarchies in there instead of putting the weight of a should in there. Rationale being that the structure within /usr and /var is quite split up and it does make sense to allow people to do the same stuff with direct root directories without any pains. > I must say I don't quite see in what scenario relative symlinks make > something work that absolute symlinks do not make work. > > So, is there any reason at all to use relative symlinks? Quite some times I experienced them to be more pain than gain, too. It might be useful if people shift around complete hierarchies, but we are not really speaking of package-internal symlinks here usually. Thanks, Rhonda -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]