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

[Aaron Griffin]

On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 10:23 AM, Xavier<shiningxc at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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 /.) "

Think we should vote on this one? Do we care enough? I like the sound
of the debian policy