GNU bug report logs - #19616
dist tarball contains hardlinks

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Message #17 received at submit <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Joerg Schilling <Joerg.Schilling <at> fokus.fraunhofer.de>
To: <jimis <at> gmx.net>, <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
Cc: bug-automake <at> gnu.org, bug-tar <at> gnu.org
Subject: Re: [Bug-tar] dist tarball contains hardlinks
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 10:38:08 +0100

Dimitrios Apostolou <jimis <at> gmx.net> wrote:

> On Fri, 16 Jan 2015, Paul Eggert wrote:
>
> > Dimitrios Apostolou wrote:
> >>  Why is such behaviour desirable?
> >
> > It's more logical, since it causes tar to behave as if the symlink were not 
> > there, and the pointed-to file was there instead.
>
> But when the tarball is extracted, two files with same inode are created, 
> which is kind of unexpected behaviour - at least for me - after creating 

The problem is not the tarball itself but the fact that someone called

	tar ch ...

This is not the right way to go for collecting files for a distribution.

In former times, I distributed symlinks with my distro tarballs but now I 
include shell scripts that create the symlinks if needed and on platforms that 
do not support symlinks, these shell scripts automatically try to create 
hardlinks.

Maybe you should contact the respobsible person for your distro tarball.

Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg <at> schily.net                    (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
       joerg.schilling <at> fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
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