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Bug#970234: consider dropping "No hard links in source packages"

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Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org> writes:

> I'm not really sure what the footnote really refers to, TBH, as I'm not
> aware of any such check, or what would require a fair amount of
> work.

Yeah, it seems to be a mystery to everyone.  There is an explicit entry in
the debian/changelog of Policy from Ian Jackson about it for version
2.1.1, but all it says is:

  * Hard links are forbidden in source packages (they didn't work anyway,
    and can't easily be made to work reliably).

This is from when Ian was maintaining dpkg, so presumably he thought
something was broken at the time, but it seems to have been lost in
history.  They do obviously work now.

> Besides the other potential issues mentioned on the bug, which I agree
> we might not care much about, a case that comes to mind would be that
> patching hard linked source files can end up being very confusing, and
> might not really break the build but can end up not producing what one
> might expect. I've quickly prepared the attached tentative and
> completely untested patch, to add a warning in that case, which I guess
> I might be targeting for dpkg 1.22.1 (once I've added some tests).

Thanks, that does seem like a good idea.

> But given that hard links in source packages do not seem prevalent at
> all, and that the tooling or linters can be improved in that direction I
> suppose it might make sense to lift this specific restriction.

Thank you for the review!  Now applied for the next release of Policy.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)              <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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Thread

Bug#970234: consider dropping "No hard links in source packages" Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> - 2022-09-21 05:00 +0200
  Bug#970234: consider dropping "No hard links in source packages" Sam Hartman <hartmans@debian.org> - 2022-09-21 15:40 +0200
  Bug#970234: consider dropping "No hard links in source packages" Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> - 2022-09-23 04:30 +0200
    Bug#970234: consider dropping "No hard links in source packages" Helmut Grohne <helmut@subdivi.de> - 2022-09-23 07:20 +0200
    Bug#970234: consider dropping "No hard links in source packages" Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> - 2023-09-10 19:50 +0200
      Bug#970234: consider dropping "No hard links in source packages" Edward Little <e.little598@gmail.com> - 2023-09-11 03:10 +0200
    Bug#970234: consider dropping "No hard links in source packages" Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org> - 2023-09-11 03:10 +0200
      Bug#970234: consider dropping "No hard links in source packages" Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> - 2023-09-11 05:30 +0200

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