Re: What's with the symlinks?

[Jamie Lenehan <lenehan@twibble.org>]

On Fri, Dec 29, 2006 at 12:12:03PM +0000, Richard Purdie wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-12-29 at 11:11 +1100, Matthew Palmer wrote:
> > Everywhere I go while assembling my OE build tree, I see admonishments not
> > to use a path that has symlinks in it.  For such a major problem, the only
> > real information on the actual problem is a fairly cryptic entry in the FAQ,
> > about a failure to build libtool-native.
> > 
> > Being an intensely curious kind of person, and not enjoying arbitrary
> > limits, I'm very interested to know what the *real* reason behind being so
> > strongly against the much-maligned symlink.  Can anyone enlighten me?
> 
> People have explained the reason but you can use paths with symlinks in
> *if* you're careful. Basically, you need to ensure the environmental

It's also possible to use bind mounts, which lets you mount one
subdirectory over another subdirectory, to achieve a similiar sort of
effect. I have my oe stuff in ~/devel/oe which is a bind mount from a
seperate disk:

  [nynaeve][ 2:02PM]~/devel/oe%> df -h .
  Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
  /u/5QF1E359/oe        294G   69G  226G  24% /home/lenehan/devel/oe
  [nynaeve][ 2:02PM]~/devel/oe%> cat /etc/fstab | grep oe
  /u/5QF1E359/oe          /home/lenehan/devel/oe  none    bind            0 0
  [nynaeve][ 2:04PM]~/devel/oe%> mount | grep 5QF1E359
  /dev/sdc2 on /u/5QF1E359 type ext3 (rw)
  /u/5QF1E359/oe on /home/lenehan/devel/oe type none (rw,bind)

So instead of a symlink from ~/devel/oe to /u/5QF1E359/oe I mounted (via a
bind mount) /u/5QF1E359/oe on ~/devel/oe

-- 
 Jamie Lenehan <lenehan@twibble.org>