Bug#986220: fonts-font-awesome: unhandled directory to symlink conversion: /usr/share/fonts-font-awesome/scss -> ../sass/font-awesome

[Andreas Beckmann <anbe@debian.org>]

Package: fonts-font-awesome
Version: 5.0.10+really4.7.0~dfsg-4
Severity: serious
User: debian-qa@lists.debian.org
Usertags: piuparts
Control: block 983853 with -1
Control: affects -1 + openstack-dashboard

Hi,

a test with piuparts revealed that your package misses some content
after an upgrade, files that should be reachable via the symlink
/usr/share/fonts-font-awesome/scss -> ../sass/font-awesome

After the upgrade /usr/share/fonts-font-awesome/scss is just an
empty directory.

This was observed on the following upgrade paths:

  openstack-dashboard from buster to bullseye

For logs see #983853


Additional info may be available here:
https://wiki.debian.org/MissingCopyrightFile

Note that dpkg intentionally does not replace directories with symlinks
and vice versa, you need the maintainer scripts to do this.
See in particular the end of point 4 in
https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-maintainerscripts.html#details-of-unpack-phase-of-installation-or-upgrade

It is recommended to use the dpkg-maintscript-helper command
'dir_to_symlink' (available since dpkg 1.17.14)
to perform the conversion, ideally using d/$PACKAGE.maintscript.
See dpkg-maintscript-helper(1) and dh_installdeb(1) for details.


cheers,

Andreas