Hard links in glibc build?

[Joseph Myers]

On Thu, 8 Feb 2018, Stan Shebs wrote:

> In the course of building current glibc using Google's internal
> filesystems, we've run across a handful of places (nptl/Makefile etc) that
> use ln -f instead of the configure setting LN_S, but the filesystem we use
> for building does not allow hard links, and we've patched glibc locally to
> make symlinks, which seems to work fine.  Is there some arcane reason that
> these need to be hard links, or can everything be changed to use symlinks?

I'd expect copies to work.  For symlinks you'd need to check if the files 
get installed (and make sure that any symlinks installed are actually 
correct in the install directory), and that rebuilding the target of the 
symlink doesn't confuse make.

localedef uses hard links in the non-archive locale installation case to 
share data between different locales, but as far as I know it should still 
work OK on a filesystem not supporting them.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com