@ryantrinkle, thanks for your PR! By analyzing the history of the files in this pull request, we identified @adnelson, @lethalman and @timclassic to be potential reviewers.

@lethalman It would be great to get your input on this. I can't say I fully understand the implications of the -k parameter here, but I did do some testing without it and my image, at least, seemed to work just fine (and was much smaller). This patch should, however, preserve the existing behavior by default.

@puffnfresh I believe this does preserve existing behavior?

@Ericson2314 yeah, but why?

@puffnfresh I think certain setup scripts might depend on the existing behavior; plus, I don't totally understand the benefit of the existing behavior, but it looks like it was intentional, so I didn't want to mess with it.

It does look like the -k may have been added in error, though: this commit says rsync contents with -keep-dirlinks, but --keep-dirlinks is -K, not -k, at least according to my rsync's docs.

@puffnfresh I think it may be best to just merge this with the backwards compatibility in place. I don't personally feel that I understand this code well enough to warrant hitting people downstream with substantive changes, even though I do agree that the old behavior is probably wrong. In the future, if we want to change the default behavior to be this behavior, it will be very easy.

ping on this, just built an image that had essentially two copies of everything. This solves my mystery :D

Any updates on this?

@ryantrinkle While i've been using dockerTools several times i am somehow drawing a mental blank on this one.

• Could you add a short but meaningful description to the PR that explains this change
• Is keepContentsDirlinks a good name for this? It says what it does on an implementation level, but maybe this could be described more from a user perspective?
• As mentioned by others it seems unclear if both ways are needed at all. Just adding it as option because nobody quite knows doesn't seem like a good way forward. Maybe there should be a deprecation date for when only one way will be available. I guess there is no precedence for a workflow like this in nixpkgs though ;/
• Documentation: Can you please, please, please add something to the documentation about this option? Because otherwise it simply does not exist from a user/newbie perspective

Any updates?

@gilligan Those are very good points; I'm going to go ahead and merge, though, so that people can at least start using this if they want to. I agree that we probably don't need to keep the old way (my guess is that it was actually a typo), so perhaps if enough people start using this, we can just eliminate the old way.