Re: Getting rid of (many) dynamic link creations in the xen build

[Jan Beulich <jbeulich@xxxxxxxx>]

On 15.10.2020 12:49, Jürgen Groß wrote:
> On 15.10.20 12:09, Jan Beulich wrote:
>> On 15.10.2020 09:58, Jürgen Groß wrote:
>>> After a short discussion on IRC yesterday I promised to send a mail
>>> how I think we could get rid of creating dynamic links especially
>>> for header files in the Xen build process.
>>>
>>> This will require some restructuring, the amount will depend on the
>>> selected way to proceed:
>>>
>>> - avoid links completely, requires more restructuring
>>> - avoid only dynamically created links, i.e. allowing some static
>>>     links which are committed to git
>>
>> While I like the latter better, I'd like to point out that not all
>> file systems support symlinks, and hence the repo then couldn't be
>> stored on (or the tarball expanded onto) such a file system. Note
>> that this may be just for viewing purposes - I do this typically at
>> home -, i.e. there's no resulting limitation from the build process
>> needing symlinks. Similarly, once we fully support out of tree
>> builds, there wouldn't be any restriction from this as long as just
>> the build tree is placed on a capable file system.
>>
>> As a result I'd like to propose variant 2´: Reduce the number of
>> dynamically created symlinks to a minimum. This said, I have to
>> admit that I haven't really understood yet why symlinks are bad.
>> They exist for exactly such purposes, I would think.
> 
> Another option would be to create the needed links from ./configure
> instead of committing them to git.

Ah yes, this would indeed seem better to me. Not sure though whether
that's conceptually a legitimate thing to do.

Jan