In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> you wrote: :> 21884 libc6-dev: relative links between top-level dirs
: The upstream maintainer (Ulrich D.) insists that the relative links are : correct and that making /usr a symlink to something else is "evil". I'm not sure I completely understand what the links in libc6-dev look like, and I don't have time to go look right now. A few quick words about why relative links are important in some circumstances seems in order, though. If you're working in a multi-machine networked environment, and are accessing another system using NFS (particularly with an automounted host map), an absolute link can easily violate "the principle of least astonishment"... if you are tracking down a remote machine's filesystems, and cross an absolute symbolic link, you're back on your local system's filesystem! That's almost never what you meant, or what you wanted. For this and related reasons, we have an almost absolute prohibition against absolute symlinks in my shop, except in cases where it really doesn't matter. For example, we have lots of symlinks that actually point off to subtrees on a mount from a central NFS server... since these all point to the same actual filesystem regardless of which machine you're on, it's ok for them to be absolute. In summary, while I don't know the details in this particular case, relative links are more often a good thing than a bad thing... Bdale -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
