Bug#1050001: Practical problems with proposed symlink farming: diversions

[Andreas Metzler <ametzler@bebt.de>]

On 2023-09-01 Ansgar <ansgar@43-1.org> wrote:
> Hi,

> a practical thing with usrmerge and legacy layout[1] is the following:
> assume you do not want programs to find a specific program via PATH
> lookup or even a fully-qualified path.
> Then a user can just divert that single program away (or just remove
> it, depending on details).

> With Jackson's proposed symlink farms this property goes away:
> users now have to handle both the copy in / and /usr!
[...]


Hello,

I do not think this is the case.

A) The proposed /bin/ will not contain symlinks for everything in
/usr/bin but just for files that used to live there. I am not sure
how common it is  to divert one of this subset in the first place.

B) I Think diverting the real file in /usr/bin would be enough, the
now broken symlink in /bin should not be found by normal path search -
At least that is true for bash, dash and tcsh, also test -x does not
succeed on the symlink.

cu Andreas
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