Bug#22935: PROPOSED] Do not make hardlinks to conffiles
> On Sun, 30 May 1999, Julian Gilbey wrote:
>
> > > Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es> wrote:
> > > > If not, should we clearly write in policy that hardlinks to conffiles
> > > > should be avoided wherever possible?
> >
> > Please could someone enlighten me about this proposal?
>
> Some time ago I discovered how bad dpkg handled hardlinks to conffiles in
> one of the packages I maintain, smartlist.
>
> If you create a list "foo", it will have a file in /var/list/foo/rc.submit
> which is just a hardlink to /var/list/.etc/rc.submit.
>
> However, if you change /var/list/.etc/rc.submit, and upgrade the package
> using dpkg, it is likely that /var/list/foo/rc.submit becomes hardlinked
> to /var/list/.etc/rc.submit.dpkg-old, usually not what you would expect.
>
> [ So I changed smartlist so that it used symlinks and not hardlinks ].
>
> I asked in debian-devel "Is this a dpkg bug or it is just that
> hardlinks to conffiles should be forbidden by policy?"
>
> and then Ian Jackson reported this as a bug against policy.
>
> If you want to make a nicely worded proposal from this (currently
> informal) bug, I will surely second it, and I assume Ian Jackson would
> too.
Fair enough. So I second Ian's proposal that policy should say, while
talking about conffiles:
"A package may not make hard links to conffiles. (This is because it
will cause technical problems perhaps leading to incorrect behaviour.)"
Julian
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, QMW, Univ. of London. J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk
Debian GNU/Linux Developer, see http://www.debian.org/~jdg
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