Moin I recently did some changes to the Debian archive so that most ressources that actually change are just symlinks. This much more suits the way rsync does it's work regarding symlinks and hardlinks. In the next step I want to change our mirror script to ignore symlinks in the first sync stage to fix some more latent bugs. This means that all symlinks will be handled in the time sensitive part of the mirror sync.
Also there was a global deduplication step running on the main Debian archive that hardlinked all identical files together. It has been disable due to it's implications it had on some parts of the archive. So all deduplication needs to be done elsewhere. Now there is exactly one other part in the archive that makes excessive use of symlinks: the installer. I would like to get rid of them within the installer. Most users don't see them anyway, as HTTP does not provide informations about symlinks. They can remain in the installer debs. Instead all identical files should be hardlinked. This allows the mirrors to only hold one copy of each. Regards, Bastian -- Fascinating is a word I use for the unexpected. -- Spock, "The Squire of Gothos", stardate 2124.5