I wrote:
>> NetBSD uses hard links between directories, e.g. between
>> /usr/sbin/sendmail and /usr/bin/mailq.  This is wrong for two reasons:

Todd wrote:
> This is hard links between *files*, not directories. They are across 
> directories, however, and so the following argument is valid:

I apologies for the ambiguous wording; I meant across directories.  It
is the case that AFS does not allow hard links across directories.  You
may find this stupid (I certainly don't like it), and you may consider
it not worth making any changes to support AFS semantics (a justifiable
view, although one which makes life rather difficult for me), which is
why I brought up the other argument.

> Absolute paths are perfectly fine in symlinks; just make sure you have a 
> preceding / on the pathname. (i.e. a symlink '/usr/bin/mailq' pointing at 
> '/usr/sbin/sendmail' is perfectly fine.

I wouldn't say that absolute paths are "perfectly" fine; if you have a
filesystem /usr with a link bin/mailq -> /usr/sbin/sendmail, and you
mount that filesystem somewhere other than /usr, the link will break
when a link to ../sbin/sendmail would not break.

However, when I consider this carefully, I think it's better to leave the
symbolic links as absolute links for now, and avoid modifying all the
Makefiles.

Of course, since I've received objections, I'm not going to make this
change without making sure the core team agrees with me.