[Bug 257140] mail/thunderbird and www/firefox install two identical executables

https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=257140

--- Comment #6 from Mikhail Teterin <mi@FreeBSD.org> ---
(In reply to Christoph Moench-Tegeder from comment #5)
> pkg doesn't really support hard links.

Huh? There are NUMEROUS multi-link files under $PREFIX, installed by different
packages, including git, llvm, and portupgrade. Moreover, man-pages have been
installed as hard-links for DECADES, including man-pages of the ports. Try:

    find /usr/local -type f -not -links 1

libexec/git-core/git, in particular, has 138 hardlinks here!

> further thinking: do we even guarantee a file system with hard link support?

I suppose, if one were to host $PREFIX on FAT floppy, things might break, yeah.
But then, he wouldn't be able to install git either -- and thus, have no
/usr/ports to begin with :-)

> Think NFS - that's a whole can of worms on it's own

NFS certainly supports hardlinks and has since its earliest versions.

> we're talking about a few hundred kB in a 200MB install size port

The actual gain is not relevant. But this is the attitude, which explains why,
despite enormous progress of the hardware, the "computing experience" is
lacking, and gigabytes are becoming necessary, where megabytes were sufficient
earlier.

> I'm not going to spent any more time than this note on that.

Thank you, that's a comforting promise, actually.

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