[systemd-devel] [PATCH] Fix systemd-stdio-bridge symlink

[Simon McVittie]

On 04/03/14 11:00, Umut Tezduyar wrote:
> Stable version of some distros (Debian Wheezy nor Ubuntu LTS 12.04)
> still don't have support for this.

Does that actually matter much? This ln usage is at build time, not
install time, and those stable versions aren't going to upgrade to a
current systemd, because avoiding non-minimal upgrades is the whole
point of stable distro releases.

The development versions of Debian and Ubuntu, where a newer systemd
will be introduced and compiled, already have recent coreutils and a
somewhat recent systemd.

Having said that, for the packaged systemd on Debian and Ubuntu it's
irrelevant whether these symlinks are relative or absolute, because
dh_link will adjust them after installation to be in the form Debian
Policy says they should be (absolute if symlink and target are in
different top-level directories like /lib and /usr, relative if they are
in the same top-level directory).

The situation that *does* matter on infrequently-released distributions
(Debian stable, Ubuntu LTS, RHEL, SLED, etc.) is the upgrade from one
stable release to the next; being able to install "most" packages from
release n on release n-1, usually lowest-level/most-depended-on first,
is desirable to avoid dependency loops (can't upgrade to the new pkgA
without the new pkgB, can't upgrade to the new pkgB without the new
pkgA, no way to proceed).

    S