Bug#738187:

[Tobias Frost <tobi@frost.de>]

Package: lintian
Severity: wishlist
Control: retitle -1 "lintian: Please ignore dangling symlink for *-spell-dictionaries"
X-Debbugs-CC: anbe@debian.org
X-Debbugs-CC: agmartin@debian.org

Hi Andreas,

well, there's defintly a point in your argument and it would be also
fine to fix that by adding ignore logix to lintian. 
 
Lets also ask the lintian people about their opinion and ask them to
ignore the dangling link in *spell-xx packages.


Dear Lintian folks,

You can find the background of this in #737515. 

In short, aspell / ispell dictionaries have hashfiles
in /var/lib/*spell/ which are hashed at install time. To have them
working they need a symlink from /usr/lib/*spell/$hashfile to
var/lib/*spell/$hashfile.
The *spell-*.debs install the symlink, and as the hashfile is only
generated at installtime, it is dangling at package creation time.

One way would be to generated the links on install-time, but I agree on
Andreas that this would be somehow overkill.
The other options is to silence package-contains-broken-symlink 
in this specific case. 
Can you do that?

Best regards,
Tobias Frost


Am Samstag, den 08.02.2014, 12:27 +0100 schrieb Andreas Beckmann:
> On 2014-02-08 11:19, Tobias Frost wrote:
> 
> > I just have an additional suggestion, however this is just something
> > something "pedantic".
> > Currently installdeb-aspell also installs a (dangling) symlink when
> > auto-compat is turned on. Lintian does emit a experimental warning on
> > that. (e.g X: aspell-it: package-contains-broken-symlink)
> > My proposal would be to add a snippet to the preinst-compat and
> > postrm-compat scripts to create and delete the symlinks.
> > Please see the attached patch, but please be warned: Perl's not a
> > language I'm fluent in.
> 
> I don't think we should put this complexity into the maintainer scripts.
> I'd rather consider this as a "false positive" in lintian since the
> package ships a dangling link, but after finished installation the link
> won't be dangling any more. So we should rather try to get this "fixed"
> in lintian, maybe even conditionally depending on some command in the
> postinst:
> 
> if (has_dangling_link(/usr/lib/*spell/*.$hash ->
> /var/lib/*spell/*.$hash) and postinst_calls(update-foo)
>   ignore_dangling_link()
> 
> I'd prefer this way instead of (automatically) adding lintian-overrides
> to every aspell-xx package.
> 
> 
> Andreas
>