> Sometimes symlinks are a necessary evil.  I usually avoid them
> myself, especially if building a system from scratch.  However,
> there are some things which cannot be avoided.  Symlinks in the case
> of an NFS- mounted build tree are one of them.

The scheme I proposed at the beginning of this conversation does not
involve symlinks.  Moreover, it's much easier to maintain a build tree
in my scheme than it is to maintain a symlink farm when the source
tree changes.