On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 11:42:23AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > Gerfried Fuchs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> * Lionel Elie Mamane <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2008-08-15 16:47:41 CEST]:
>>> 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. > And Debian doesn't support relocatable packages in general anyway. Well, users are not feeling they are "relocating" a package when replacing one of its directories by a symlink to elsewhere; after all, paths of the form /original/package/file/patch still work. > We should clearly use relative symlinks within the same directory, and > probably from a directory to a subdirectory, but I do wonder about the > merits of any symlink containing ../. I'm not sure what we'd lose by > making any symlink that climbs directories absolute instead of relative, > and I think we'd definitely gain from having somewhat less weirdness and > breakage in corner cases. Well, these symlink for example: /usr/share/doc/bash/completion-contrib -> ../bash-completion/contrib /usr/share/doc/bash-doc/examples -> ../bash/examples /usr/share/doc/cpp/README.Bugs -> ../gcc-4.2/README.Bugs should IMHO stay relative, because of the scenario described by Manoj, and users are extremely unlikely to replace a subdirectory of /usr/share/doc by a symlink (except /usr/share/doc/texmf?). But maybe managing such exceptions would be too hairy altogether and we'd want a much simpler policy in exchange for only 99.9% correctness. -- Lionel -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
