911325 – dev-vcs/git: introduce USE=make-symlinks to generate symlinks of subcommands instead of hardlinks

Bug 911325 - dev-vcs/git: introduce USE=make-symlinks to generate symlinks of subcommands instead of hardlinks

Summary: dev-vcs/git: introduce USE=make-symlinks to generate symlinks of subcommands ...

Status:	UNCONFIRMED

Alias:	None

Product:	Gentoo Linux
Classification:	Unclassified
Component:	Current packages (show other bugs)
Hardware:	All Linux

Importance:	Normal normal (vote)
Assignee:	Robin Johnson

URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:	PullRequest

Depends on:
Blocks:

Reported:	2023-07-27 16:59 UTC by Azamat H. Hackimov
Modified:	2023-07-27 19:20 UTC (History)
CC List:	1 user (show)

See Also:	https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/pull/32069
Package list:
Runtime testing required:	---

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Description Azamat H. Hackimov 2023-07-27 16:59:10 UTC

I'm working on creating custom made LiveISO with catalyst and noticed that dev-vcs/git takes enormously large space after creating SquashFS image like this:

du -h */usr/libexec/git-core --max-depth=0 
22M  livecd-stage1-core2-hardened-nomultilib-openrc-2023.03.05/usr/libexec/git-core
502M  livecd-stage2-core2-hardened-nomultilib-openrc-2023.03.05/usr/libexec/git-core

After some investigations I found that catalyst uses pyDeComp library that not preserves hardlinks (see https://github.com/dol-sen/pyDeComp/issues/10).

dev-vcs/git also supports build option INSTALL_SYMLINKS which replaces subcommands' hardlinks to git binary with symlinks. While this is rather catalyst issue, it would be great to introduce USE=make-symlinks to reduce image size for such cases.