Bug#1031696: Use of symbolic links in non-free ISO images breaks file system transposition support

Followup-For: Bug #1031696

On Sat, 11 Mar 2023 12:16:47 +0100, Thomas Schmitt wrote:
> This could be achieved by a bunch of hard links instead of the symbolic
> links. In /firmware of firmware-bookworm-DI-alpha1-amd64-netinst.iso
> i see only symbolic links to data files. So replacing symlinks by
> hardlinks should be technically possible.

> xorriso represents hard link siblings in ISO 9660 and Joliet as data files
> which use the same data content blocks. So these views of the Debian ISO
> would produce separate copies of target and link when both get extracted
> to disk.

Thank you, Thomas.  Related to that, it looks like the selection of CD image
creation tool is configured per-architecture here:

https://salsa.debian.org/images-team/debian-cd/-/blob/5aebb6794a3b8b2393663fb643e35eb8e510c9a4/Makefile#L24

It seems like a fairly significant option to modify, though - certainly worth
testing.

I'm building a local Debian bookworm archive mirror with 'debmirror' in the
hope of testing CD image filesystem creation with xorriso.