On Fri, Oct 04, 2002 at 12:15:02AM -0700, ben wrote: > On Thursday 03 October 2002 10:19 pm, Colin Watson wrote: > > On Thu, Oct 03, 2002 at 09:25:00PM -0700, ben wrote: > > > is there any kind of process by which dangling symlinks can be resolved? > > > > Er, that depends. Which ones? Either remove them or get them to point > > somewhere that exists. > > > > Cheers, > > hi colin, > > thanks for the response. i guess the question should probably be, how do > dangling symlinks come to occur in the first place?
I recently looked at a number of dangling symlinks (some of which were for man pages) I had in /etc/alternatives. For all but one of these I eventually traced the problem back to debs installed while potato was still testing. Some version installed the symlink; a later update either didn't require the symlink or changed the name of the file to which the symlink should link. For example, an early potato deb for elvis installed /usr/man/man1/ctags-elvis.1.gz and in later packages this file changed to /usr/share/man/man1/elvtags.1.gz. During the update process the first packages gets removed, but the prerm script does not remove the alternative. If there is no other alterntive, you end up with a broken symlink, and update-alternatives gets set to manual mode for that alternative. When the new package is installed, the symlink doesn't get updated because update-alternatives is now in maunal mode. The fix is to run "update-alternatives --config [name]" to reset the symlink or "update-alternative --remove [name] [dangling_symlink_path]" to remove the symlink entirely. > > for example: > > me@mybox:$ man gconftool > man: warning: /usr/share/man/man1/gconftool.1.gz is a dangling symlink > No manual entry for gconftool > > should I construe from this that there never was a man page for gconftool, or > is it the case that it simply failed to install? in the event that there is a > man page for each of the many various apps that return this message on man > requests, what's the best way to fix this? > > am i making sense here? > > ben > > > -- Jerome
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