Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: RFC: split up media-sound/ category

[Jesús J. Guerrero Botella]

2011/6/23 Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@×××.net>:
> Jesús J. Guerrero Botella posted on Thu, 23 Jun 2011 08:15:44 +0200 as
> excerpted:
>
>> Symlinks are clean, and portage has always been file-oriented so I see
>> no problem with using them for this.
>
> It has been some years since I've seen the argument made, but if I'm not
> mistaken, at least back in 2004-ish when I first switched to Gentoo, the
> argument against in-tree symlinking (or multi-hard-linking, for that
> matter) of any kind (other than the obvious directory hard-linking) was
> that we wanted to keep the tree at least minimally deployable on non-Unix
> filesystems like fat/ntfs.  Note that while a user's profile uses a
> symlink, the symlink is on /etc (which is thus implied to be a Unix
> filesystem with symlinking capacities) pointing /into/ the tree, NOT
> actually PART OF the tree.
>
> One scenario in which this might be a factor is that of someone doing
> their syncs and source downloads at work where they have lots of
> bandwidth available, then sneakernetting it home on a fat32 formatted
> thumbdrive.
>
> Now it can be argued that the flexibility benefit of multi-category
> packages trumps that of being able to put the tree on fat or whatever,
> but there IS a definite loss of tree portability that's implied, and thus
> a tradeoff to be considered.

Yes, that's true. But it's also true that besides the symlinks, the
portage tree will be broken the same moment you put it into a fat
volume, because it will directly erase all the permissions and
ownership metadata. So, the thing is already broken, why should we
care if it breaks a bit more? Seriously, limiting ourselves because of
an fs that not even MS uses any longer is not a smart thing to do, in
my opinion.

-- 
Jesús Guerrero Botella