On Sun, 30 May 1999, Julian Gilbey wrote: > > Santiago Vila <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > If not, should we clearly write in policy that hardlinks to conffiles > > > should be avoided wherever possible? > > Please could someone enlighten me about this proposal?
Some time ago I discovered how bad dpkg handled hardlinks to conffiles in one of the packages I maintain, smartlist. If you create a list "foo", it will have a file in /var/list/foo/rc.submit which is just a hardlink to /var/list/.etc/rc.submit. However, if you change /var/list/.etc/rc.submit, and upgrade the package using dpkg, it is likely that /var/list/foo/rc.submit becomes hardlinked to /var/list/.etc/rc.submit.dpkg-old, usually not what you would expect. [ So I changed smartlist so that it used symlinks and not hardlinks ]. I asked in debian-devel "Is this a dpkg bug or it is just that hardlinks to conffiles should be forbidden by policy?" and then Ian Jackson reported this as a bug against policy. If you want to make a nicely worded proposal from this (currently informal) bug, I will surely second it, and I assume Ian Jackson would too. Thanks. -- "55350c3b320ab00fb02c95227160ff49" (a truly random sig)
