Re: prefix containing symlink

[maya%NetBSD.org@localhost]

On Sat, Aug 03, 2019 at 10:36:21AM +0200, Jörn Clausen wrote:
> I probably missed the discussion for this change in bootstrap/bootstrap:
> 
> revision 1.263
> date: 2019-05-01 20:29:20 +0200;  author: rillig;  state: Exp;  lines:
> +33 -4;  commitid: N2QfoUQUe0nh0xlB;
> bootstrap: prevent pkgsrcdir, prefix and wrkdir from being symlinks
> 
> What is the rationale behind it? I was just about to install into an
> automounted directory and this prohibits it. Could you at least
> provide an option to override this?
> 
> -- 
> Joern Clausen
> https://www.oe-files.de/photography/

It causes some pain down the road:
buildlink/cwrappers will drop arguments to libraries not listed as
dependencies.
something following symlinks and converting it to the real path in the
compilation argument will have those arguments silently removed by
pkgsrc tooling.

people kept running into very cryptic issues (I believe it was
gobject-introspection or some glib-package) where they are the only ones
who can't build a package, it's not clear why, and after a lot of
effort someone figures it out.

many operating systems offer bind/null mounts that act similar to hard
links, so the symlink path cannot be followed, as an alternative.