Subject: Re: [bug#29181] [PATCH 1/1] gnu: mesa: Use symlinks instead of hard links.

From: [email-masked] (Ludovic Courtès)
Date: Wed, 08 Nov 2017 09:27:29 +0100

Hi,

Marius Bakke <[email-masked]> skribis:

> Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]> writes:
>
>> This reduces the nar size (as shown by 'guix size') by 124 MiB, from
>> 169 MiB to 45 MiB (almost divided by 4!).
>
> Wow, nice catch.  If I read the code correctly, it detects hard links
> and replaces them with symlinks.

Yes.

> Could we do this unconditionally in a gnu-build-system phase?  Are
> there any legitimate uses of hard links in outputs?

Good question.  There might be situations where the software relies on
having regular files (not symlinks), so I would rather do it on a
case-by-case basis than have a standard phase.  WDYT?

Besides, a phase that looks at all the files would have to be efficient
than this naïve implementation.

> That said, the patch LGTM.

Pushed as dcc00f54c619118d11982383102d2e9a1b86d080, thanks!

Ludo’.