Re: Shall we state about #17624 dpkg feature(bug?)
On Tue, Jul 24, 2001 at 04:24:14PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> Symlinks are required to be relative within top-level directories, and
> absolute across top level directories. So /usr/blahblahblah -> /usr/hummdedum
> needs to be relative, while /usr/blahblahblah -> /var/hummdedum needs to be
> absolute. That is in policy somewhere.
Yes, section 11.5. Symbolic Links.
So the admin is permitted to symlink /usr, /var and other common filesystem
mount points, but symlinking, say, /var/lib/postgres to /array/01 is not
supported? If there were any relative symlinks in /var/lib/postgres (there
don't appear to be at the moment), they would likely break.
> It just means you need to add some directory symlinks if you're moving things
> around too much, so symlink-for-usr-doc/../share has to be a symlink to
> /usr/share.
That gets to be a big mess very quickly, especially when dealing with links
like ../../../../bin/xscanimage (in the sane package). What happens when you
upgrade a package, and it includes relative symlinks that weren't there before?
You would have to hand-audit the upgrade, or wait for something to break.
If admins were not allowed to make symlinks in dpkg's territory, handling
directory/symlink transitions wouldn't be quite so hairy. Of course, all
packages which were using the directory would have to agree about the nature of
the directory/symlink to a symlink in order to coexist, and the resulting
conflicts make the whole business pretty distasteful anyway.
--
- mdz
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