On 2016-04-19 06:03:52 +0000, Dave Yeo said:
The problem is that symlinks on OS/2 (unless using TVFS.IFS) are inherently fragile. It just takes one utility that is not aware of them to break things and not everything is linked against kLIBC. In FFmpegs case we use lxlite, which is a Pascal program and knows nothing of symlinks.
lxlite works with executables and we can't use symlinks for executables anyway (because the kernel doesn't support them and won't be able to load such binaries). If lxlite encounters a symlink to a dll or an exe, it will simply skip it (becuase it will only see a text file) - and this is asbolutely fine and safe. So lxlite is not a problem. You also speak theoretically, like KOMH. In practice, I personally don't know a single problem that would come out of symlinks and require something non-trivial to solve it. And I do A LOT of stuff.
I personally prefer to only use symlinks when needed, such as _virtualenv, and currently using my older environment can often pass all the FATE tests, whereas the new environment has more failures. As leaving it in doesn't hurt your use case anyways, my vote is to leave it in.
I always use symlinks and have absolutely no problems with that. You use the RPM/YUM UNIXROOT environment too (IIRC) so you indirectly use them as well. I can assure you, you wouldn't see all the current OS/2 progress if we didn't switch to the Unix-based toolchain. And symlinks is part of it. So it's not about the number of votes, it's about progress and future.
http://fate.ffmpeg.org/history.cgi?slot=x86.os2.446 http://fate.ffmpeg.org/history.cgi?slot=x86.os2.492
Regarding tests, that's a different story. I believe symlinks have a tiny contribution in test failures (if at all). And that's in general, again. In case of FFmpeg, symlinks don't make any harm (at least you didn't present any proof of that so far).
-- Kind regards, Dmitriy Kuminov CPO of bww bitwise works GmbH _______________________________________________ ffmpeg-devel mailing list ffmpeg-devel@ffmpeg.org http://ffmpeg.org/mailman/listinfo/ffmpeg-devel
