Bug 911325

Summary:	dev-vcs/git: introduce USE=make-symlinks to generate symlinks of subcommands instead of hardlinks
Product:	Gentoo Linux	Reporter:	Azamat H. Hackimov <azamat.hackimov>
Component:	Current packages	Assignee:	Robin Johnson <robbat2>
Status:	UNCONFIRMED ---
Severity:	normal	CC:	jstein
Priority:	Normal	Keywords:	PullRequest
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
See Also:	https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/pull/32069
Whiteboard:
Package list:		Runtime testing required:	---

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.