[arch-general] Soft vs Hard links for man pages

[Allan McRae]

Hi all,

I was looking into bug FS#5392 [1] which details makepkg's inability to 
compress all man pages.  Specifically, it fails when files are hard 
linked because gzip does not work on them.  I have made a fairly simple 
fix for this. For a specific man page, it removes all other hard links, 
compresses the page and then regenerates the links.

When the links are regenerated, is it preferable that they are hard 
linked again or should they be soft linked? I am leaning towards hard 
linked because that is the way they were upstream.  However, the script 
I used to use to compress man pages in LFS had an option to turn them 
into soft links, so there must have been demand for soft links.  Note 
that with soft links, it would be the first file found by "find" that 
everything would be linked to and that may seem strange in some 
contexts. Probably another reason to stick with hard links.

Also, one of the comments in the bug report [2] mentions that bz2 files 
are not changed.  I could at the same time add a change to convert these 
to gzip format but does that really matter?  Both gzip and bzip2 are in 
core/base.

Finally, now pacman has been moved to git I really have no idea how to 
create a diff! Can anybody suggest a good git cheatsheet?

Cheers
Allan

[1]http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/5392
[2]http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/5392#comment15422