Re: Relative symbolic links to standard places
Kai Henningsen writes:
>shawn@nfinity.nfinity.com (Shawn Asmussen) wrote:
>>Wouldn't it save a lot of problems if you simply mounted seperate
>>partitions on /usr/lib and /usr/src, instead of mounting them
>>somewhere else and pointing links to them? Then the relative links
>>should point to
>
>The problem is probably that he has moved both to one partition, not
>two. It's a setup I've used myself, long ago, in Slackware times.
I used to have this sort of thing long ago, too - back in the dark
ages when dpkg didn't really understand symlinks and regularly trashed
such setups, in fact l-)
>And yes, it sure breaks relative symlinks something awful. There
>doesn't seem to be a way to keep them working with this kind of
>setup.
It ought to be doable for dpkg to catch any symlinks and adjust them
to point to the right place. And, also, to register them somewhere
and allow the user to rebuild the symlinks after shifting things
around.
(This would, in fact, allow package maintainers to put in relative or
absolute symlinks to their own taste, and have dpkg sort it out for
them at install time. However they shouldn't do so as it would break
on systems still using the older versions of dpkg.)
Having relative symlinks has its advantages - it means that if you
mount your system on somewhere funny (and I've been in positions where
I've done this) then all the symlinks point to the right place (if
they did in the first place); use absolute symlinks and that wouldn't
work.
--
Richard Kettlewell
http://www.elmail.co.uk/staff/richard/ richard@uk.geeks.org
It was definitely murder - but was it art?
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