[arch-dev-public] general packaging question about symlinks

[Xavier]

On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 5:13 PM, Thomas Bächler<thomas at archlinux.org> wrote:
> Aaron Griffin schrieb:
>>
>> That's a fair point, but what use is an Arch system that's not
>> chrooted into? I don't expect /mnt/archlinux/usr/bin/gtkpod to work on
>> a CentOS system. It sounds like an edge case.
>
> Not talking about binaries here, but generally messing around with random
> files on a mounted system. I often found myself in a great mess with
> absolute symlinks in the past, while relative never gave any downside.
>
>

A quick google returned me a similar discussion with similar arguments :
https://www.zarb.org/pipermail/rpmlint-discuss/2006-June/000094.html
And apparently they decided to prefer relative symlinks.

However, the debian policy linked in the same post does not seem to
have changed :
"In general, symbolic links within a top-level directory should be
relative, and symbolic links pointing from one top-level directory
into another should be absolute. (A top-level directory is a
sub-directory of the root directory /.) "