Re: Offical possible links (Was: lintian: symlinks ...)
On Fri, 6 Mar 1998, Yann Dirson wrote:
> Santiago Vila writes:
> > > On my installation, all such links are relative, so I suppose it's not
> > > a mistake from me, and it is probably a lintian bug, or is there
> > > really a reason of using absolute links there ?
> >
> > I'm afraid there is one: /usr may be a symlink to somewhere else.
>
> Ah yes. Then we should better officially state which dirs can be
> symlinks to other places, and which can be safely traversed by
> relative paths. Otherwise paragraph 3.3.5 in the policy manual may be
> quite inadequate.
IMHO, any top dir that is not necessary on the root file system can be a
symlink to somewhere. This means that /bin, /etc, /dev, /lib, /sbin (and
perhaps also /root and /tmp) can not be a symlink and that any other
directory in / can.
Also, if relative symlinks are allowed or even required if they stay
within on top level directory (i.e. the symlink is under /usr and also
points to something under /usr, like /usr/bin/X11 -> ../X11R6/bin), no
other directory than top level directories can be a symlink if it is not
already a symlink in the distribution. This means that directories like
/usr/X11R6 and /var/log could not be symlinks.
It might even be a good idea to patch the "symlinks" program to follow the
policy, once there is a (new) policy.
Remco
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