Bug#626338: debian-policy: Clarification of 10.5 symlink wording
Package: debian-policy
Version: 3.9.2.0
Severity: minor
The wording of section 10.5, where it says whether symlinks should be
absolute or relative, is not particularly clear if the symlink is to
a top-level file or directory rather than into one (such as a link from
/var/run to /run). The intent was to require that these be absolute
links so that, were /var a symlink to some other location, the /var/run
symlink would still work properly.
The rationale should be mentioned in a non-normative footnote.
Carsten Hey suggests:
As already mentioned, I don't think the wording of §10.5 strictly
applies to the /run symlink. "lib64 -> /lib" also somehow involves
different top-level directories, but (contrary to the /run symlink), the
reason why §10.5 is in the policy does not apply to it.
To match the original intention more closely and to clarify §10.5,
| symbolic links pointing from one top-level directory into another
| should be absolute
could be written as ("out of" was stolen from [1]):
| symbolic links pointing out of a top-level directory should be
| absolute
or alternatively as:
| symbolic links pointing from one top-level directory out of it should
| be absolute
-- System Information:
Debian Release: wheezy/sid
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.38-2-686-bigmem (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
debian-policy depends on no packages.
debian-policy recommends no packages.
Versions of packages debian-policy suggests:
ii doc-base 0.10.1 utilities to manage online documen
-- no debconf information
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