Bug#356307: lintian: wrong error messages for broken symlinks

[Michael Spang <mspang@twcny.rr.com>]

Russ Allbery wrote:

>Michael Spang <mspang@twcny.rr.com> writes:
>
>I'm pretty sure lintian's behavior here is correct.  That message isn't
>because the symlink is broken; it's because of exactly the problem that
>you discovered.  It ascended one too many levels, which means that it was
>actually a symlink to:
>
>    /share/mozilla-extensions/greasemonkey
>
>Since the symlink was in /usr and was pointing to a file in /share, it
>correctly triggered the lintian error about relative symlinks between
>top-level directories.
>
>When you changed it to an absolute symlink, you of course fixed where it
>was pointing to, and lintian then complained that it should be relative.
>
>The circumstances under which you arrived at the error ended up being
>rather confusing, but I think that lintian was always telling you the
>truth.  lintian cannot in general warn about dangling symlinks since it's
>not uncommon to have the target of the symlink provided by another package
>(think development packages for shared libraries, for instance, but there
>are other cases).
>
>  
>
Ah, that makes perfect sense. I'm not sure why I didn't realize
this myself. Sorry for the noise. I guess you should close this report. ;-)

Thanks!
Michael Spang