On Thu, 2012-10-04 at 01:53:56 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > Andreas Beckmann <deb...@abeckmann.de> writes: > > So what is the general recommendation about packages that ship files > > over symlinked directories? Should this be forbidden because it opens > > cans of worms? > > Yes.
Right. > This sort of thing: > > > foo ships /usr/share/foo/foo.dat > > > bar ships /usr/share/foobar/bar.dat > > /usr/share/foo -> foobar > > is clearly broken and can't ever be the situation we actually want to have > in the archive. In addition to the problem you name involving bar moving > the symlink, what happens if bar adds a file /usr/share/foobar/foo.dat? > Does dpkg even correctly realize that the two packages conflict because > they both ship the same file (just via different paths)? Nope, dpkg does not currently have enough information (missing metadata) to know if a path was shipped in the package as a directory or as a symlink, and to be able to distinguish between admin modified directory←→symlinks. AFAIR there's already a bug report about this kind of situation on dpkg. > The trick, of course, will be finding this sort of problem so that > maintainers can avoid it proactively rather than having to react to bugs > or QA reports. I'm not sure if we'll be able to do that, which would be > unfortunate. But I think it's fairly clear that situation isn't sensible > or stable. For the dpkg side of things I'm planning on working on the database metadata tracking for 1.17.x, which is needed for other stuff, and as a side effect this kind of situation could be handled. For now something else will be needed to spot this kind of problems though. thanks, guillem -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20121004093413.ga5...@gaara.hadrons.org
