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Re: Bug#295213: general: Upgrade removed /usr/local (symlink)



Adam Heath <doogie@debian.org> schrieb:

> On Mon, 14 Feb 2005, Frank Küster wrote:
>
>> Please be so kind and keep the bug number address in the Cc
>>
>> Tuomo Valkonen <tuomov@iki.fi> wrote:
>>
>> > On Mon, Feb 14, 2005 at 03:24:59PM +0100, Frank Küster wrote:
>> >> Is any tetex package installed on the system, and can you give the
>> >> version numbers currently installed and, ideally, of the old ones before
>> >> the upgrade? We had a bug with /usr/local/ in tetex-base, and this might
>> >> be connected.
>> >
>> > Tetex is installed, tetex-base being currently version 2.0.2c-6. I don't
>> > know the previous version, but I think I last upgraded sometime around
>> > mid-january.
>>
>> Could it have been after January 24st? This is the date when we released
>> a version (2.0.2c-4) that erroneously shipped /usr/local/share/texmf in
>> the deb. This caused a symlink to be converted to a real file for one
>> user when he upgraded from the buggy version to the fixed version,
>> 2.0.2c-5 (that did no longer contain that directory).
>
> Er, don't think so.
>
> dpkg doesn't convert symlinks to dirs.

No, that not, for sure. But a user has reported a problem to the
debian-tetex-bin mailinglist that seemed to have the following cause:

1 when the buggy version that contained /usr/local/share/texmf was
  installed, dpkg followed the symlink and created the directory in the
  target dir of the symlink

2 when the corrected version was installed, dpkg first removed the
  directory /usr/local/share/texmf, found that /usr/local/share/ was
  empty and not owned by anyone, removed it, and found the same for
  /usr/local. Therefore it removed it, not caring for its symlinkicity.

3 After this, the corrected version tried whether it could create
  /usr/local/share/texmf in its postinst. But there was an other small
  bug, I used "mkdir -p" for that, and that made /usr/local reappear as
  an ordinary directory.

I don't know whether 2 is really true, but this is how we concluded that
things must have happened.

However, I don't think that in this case it is tetex-base's fault:
First, Tuomo said that the previous upgrade was most probably before
January 24, and second there would have been a /usr/local/share/texmf on
his system, which wasn't.

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer



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