Relative links

[ebourg]

The Debian Policy requires to create relative links unless the link points to another top level directory:

http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-files.html#s10.5

I suggest to normalize automatically the links specified by the user and make them relative if required. For example a link named /usr/share/java/foo.jar and pointing to /usr/share/java/foo-1.0.jar would point instead to ./foo-1.0.jar

[tmortagne]

I'm not sure about this, it's more a best practice than a technical requirement and there could be use case where you want your link to be absolute for some reason. It's not like it was impossible to indicate a relative link in the pom.xml. I would let users deal with that.

[ebourg]

Lintian prints a warning for non relative links:

http://lintian.debian.org/tags/symlink-should-be-relative.html

That's not strictly required to make a working package, but I think we should do our best to produce lintian clean packages.

An argument for relative links I believe is for chrooted file systems. If you access the files outside of the chroot you should still be able to follow the links. This is not possible with absolute links.