Should rpm be hard linking files between packages

[Mike Fleetwood]

Hi,

Is it normal and expected for rpm to be hard linking, presumably
identical, files between independent packages?

It might be a natural occurrence because of the PartialHardlinkSets
support added to rpm 4.0.4.
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/drafts/rpm-guide-en/ch-rpm-evolution.html


Most of the Makefiles between the 2 different kernel-devel packages
are hard linked together like this:

[mike at rockover ~]$ ls -li /usr/src/kernels/*/arch/alpha/boot/Makefile
9457971 -rw-r--r-- 2 root root 3581 2008-08-04 19:17
/usr/src/kernels/2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i686/arch/alpha/boot/Makefile
9457971 -rw-r--r-- 2 root root 3581 2008-08-04 19:17
/usr/src/kernels/2.6.26.3-29.fc9.i686/arch/alpha/boot/Makefile
[mike at rockover ~]$ rpm -qf /usr/src/kernels/*/arch/alpha/boot/Makefile
kernel-devel-2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i686
kernel-devel-2.6.26.3-29.fc9.i686
[mike at rockover ~]$ find /usr/src/kernels/2.6.26.3-29.fc9.i686/ -name
Makefile -print | xargs ls -l | awk '{ln[$2]=ln[$2]+1} END{for (i in
ln) print i, ln[i]}'
1 247
2 774


Thanks,
Mike