Hardlinks in port images

[Enrico Placci]

Hello,
I was looking for the images of my installed ports when I stumbled on
https://trac.macports.org/ticket/13143
Is there a way to revert to the original behaviour? How is the new
behaviour different from direct + archived packages?
It seems to me the best solution would have just been to change the
default settings (to direct + archived , so to not conflict with that
broken backup system by default) and leave the choice to the users.
But maybe it is just me not seeing the full picture here.
Can somebody please help/ give me some insight?
I'm just trying to save some space on a very tight 128GB disk, I'll
move to direct if I must but I really liked the old behaviour (I find
very useful to have different versions of some of the software I need)
and I thought one of the future objectives was to link against the
libraries in the image rather than in the default path to enable
having incompatible libraries installed at the same time.

Thank you
Cheers
Enrico