From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Newsgroups: fa.linux.kernel
Subject: Re: [PATCH 00/18] Make common x86 arch area for i386 and x86_64 -
Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 17:52:45 UTC
Message-ID: <fa.bSvoJIKPxJMOmvFNyFaGAFd0j1A@ifi.uio.no>

On Wed, 14 Mar 2007, Steven Rostedt wrote:
>
> That's created at build time.  But I don't see anywhere in a freshly
> cloned repo or fresh untar of the linux tarball, where there exists any
> symbolic links.

There are none.

Symlinks embedded in the source tree tend to be hard to maintain: you can
traditionally not send patches to add/change/move/remove them, and not
everybody can even import them at all (ie some people have been so damaged
by CVS that they maintain their kernels in it - I'm trying my best to be a
humanitarian and rid the world of the scourge that is CVS, but I'm not
sure I can undo the untold mental damage wrought by it over decades of
quiet suffering).

With git, you can track symlinks and send them as patches, but we've not
really had a huge reason to do so. They are easy enough to generate from
Makefiles if required, and quite often you don't really need to anyway (ie
the "symlink" is often just a make rule, like the

	SRCDIR := ../../../i386/kernel/cpu/cpufreq

line I quoted earlier).

So I'd rather not even start using symlinks unless there is some really
good reason. We can continue to just use Makefiles.

		Linus