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Make dpkg following symlinks?



On Thu, Jul 01, 1999 at 08:45:45AM -0500, Chris Lawrence wrote:
> On Jul 01, Santiago Vila wrote:
> > Yes, and this is what is done in GNU/Hurd as well (usr -> /).
> > 
> > The problem is that once that you have forced dpkg to "follow" a symlink
> > to install a package (which is perfectly possible and it sort of works),
> > it is nearly impossible to upgrade to another version of the same package
> > having the files in the real destination. dpkg is unable to see that the
> > files in the "wrong" place that followed the symlink and the files in the
> > "right" place which do not need to follow the symlink (or viceversa)  are
> > the same and get extremely confused.
> 
> I've noticed some problems with alien packages that use /usr/bin/X11
> instead of /usr/X11R6/bin.  Ideally dpkg would resolve path names
> using the GNU realpath() function (or equivalent; I implemented
> something identical in Python for reportbug). 

Hello,

I think we should really think about adding this to our hacked version of
dpkg. The idea is that dpkg shoud not store /usr/foo/bar in it's database
when installing through the symlink but /foo/bar.

I haven't checked the dpkg source wrt this issue, but I think it shouldn't
be too hard to hack it. Please give me your opinion if this is a good idea.
What could go wrong?

Thanks,
Marcus

-- 
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Marcus Brinkmann              GNU    http://www.gnu.org     master.debian.org
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