https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=98964
--- Comment #11 from Emil Velikov emil.l.velikov@gmail.com --- (In reply to Zoltán Böszörményi from comment #9)
Although the OS is Yocto, the Mesa recipe is mostly mine including the patch to revert this horrible idea of hard links. Hard links are good until you package the drivers into separate subpackages as it breaks the hard links and creates separate files instead. I saved more than 50MB on a 2GB disk which is substantial for an embedded system where we need the disk space but it is very constrained.
Haven't seen any ill effect on our systems because of it. We use only single GPU machines, so it shouldn't make a difference in behaviour. Perhaps with PRIME it would but we don't use it.
I'm getting really off topic with this:
Above all: yes using hard links is nasty.
If you're having a single (or multiple fixed) GPU system then building multiple drivers is a _very_ bad idea. If you're doing that for embedded systems then it gets even worse. Thus having separate $driver subpackages makes no sense :-(
Using symlinks is brittle (not PRIME related). So you really don't want to ship something based on it. </offtopic>