Re: Direct symlink farm for transitive dependencies vs search paths

[Taylan Kammer]

On 18.09.2024 01:24, amano.kenji wrote:
> Let's say that A depends on B, and B depends on C.
>
> With search paths, A doesn't have symlinks to B, and B doesn't have symlinks 
> to C. Thus, disk space is saved.
>
> However, adding search path patches to existing softwares is cumbersome, and 
> a long list of search paths results in inefficient searches.
>
> Let's assume that B has symlinks to C, and A has symlinks to everything in B. 
> This means A has symlinks to symlinks in B. Transitive symlink is probably 
> more efficient than search path. If A just copies symlinks from B and has 
> symlinks to plain files in B, then A ends up with only direct symlinks. 
> Direct symlinks are more efficient than transitive symlinks.
>
> It seems that search paths are preferred over symlinks to transitive 
> dependencies in gnu guix. Why?
>
I believe the appropriate mailing list to ask this in would be one of the 
Guix-specific ones, such as guix-devel@gnu.org.

This mailing list is about the GNU system in general, not specific to any one 
distribution of it.

- Taylan