[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#626263: Clarification of §10.5 symlink wording needed

[Carsten Hey]

* Russ Allbery [2011-05-10 15:32 -0700]:
> Carsten Hey <carsten at debian.org> writes:
>
> > Besides "/usr -> /", are symlinks to directories still supported as
> > top-level directories and are there still people using such a setup?
> > If nobody uses this anymore, the policy could be adapted to the year
> > 2011.
>
> Is there any reason *not* to continue supporting them?  They can
> definitely save you as a short term measure to work around a bad
> partitioning scheme until one can fix it by reformatting.

This is a valid use case.  With a valid use case, there does not seem to
be any doubt that the link target should be /run and not ../run.


As already mentioned, I don't think the wording of §10.5 strictly
applies to the /run symlink.  "lib64 -> /lib" also somehow involves
different top-level directories, but (contrary to the /run symlink), the
reason why §10.5 is in the policy does not apply to it.


To match the original intention more closely and to clarify §10.5,

| symbolic links pointing from one top-level directory into another
| should be absolute

could be written as ("out of" was stolen from [1]):

| symbolic links pointing out of a top-level directory should be
| absolute

or alternatively as:

| symbolic links pointing from one top-level directory out of it should
| be absolute


Regards
Carsten


 [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1998/02/msg00627.html