On Fri, 30 Aug 2002, Adam C Powell IV wrote:
Greetings,
Just writing to request a "second opinion" on this bug.
Current dpkg behavior does not allow a package to replace a directory
with a symlink during upgrade. This broke a libc6-dev upgrade when I
made an unstable chroot from a potato tarball on an ARM system a couple
of months ago. See bug 151669 and the debian-arm thread I started a
while ago (URL below) for details.
http://lists.debian.org/debian-arm/2002/debian-arm-200208/msg00017.html
Wichert promptly closed my bug reporting this, #156463, saying "this is
the way it's supposed to be".
IMHO, this is broken behavior, as it creates a limitation on package
upgrading which has nothing whatsoever to do with policy, or with any
sound reason for that matter. Furthermore, that upgrade behaves
differently in this regard from remove then install (which works just
fine) sounds bizarre. Is there something I'm overlooking such that
things should be this way?
Please cc me in replies as I'm not subscribed.
So, what happens when someone does this:
==
mkfs.ext2 /dev/sda5
mount /dev/sda5 /mount/sda5/
cp -a /usr /mount/sda5/usr
cp -a /var /mount/sda5/var
rm -rf /usr
rm -rf /var
ln -s mount/sda5/usr usr
ln -s mount/sda5/var var