On Fri, 6 Mar 1998, Yann Dirson wrote: > Santiago Vila writes: > > > On my installation, all such links are relative, so I suppose it's not > > > a mistake from me, and it is probably a lintian bug, or is there > > > really a reason of using absolute links there ? > > > > I'm afraid there is one: /usr may be a symlink to somewhere else. > > Ah yes. Then we should better officially state which dirs can be > symlinks to other places, and which can be safely traversed by > relative paths. Otherwise paragraph 3.3.5 in the policy manual may be > quite inadequate.
IMHO, any top dir that is not necessary on the root file system can be a symlink to somewhere. This means that /bin, /etc, /dev, /lib, /sbin (and perhaps also /root and /tmp) can not be a symlink and that any other directory in / can. Also, if relative symlinks are allowed or even required if they stay within on top level directory (i.e. the symlink is under /usr and also points to something under /usr, like /usr/bin/X11 -> ../X11R6/bin), no other directory than top level directories can be a symlink if it is not already a symlink in the distribution. This means that directories like /usr/X11R6 and /var/log could not be symlinks. It might even be a good idea to patch the "symlinks" program to follow the policy, once there is a (new) policy. Remco
