On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 7:05 AM, Andrew Flegg <and...@bleb.org> wrote: > On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 11:49, Mikko Vartiainen <mvartiai...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> >>> Perhaps a solution is to have maemo-optify keep the directory structure >>> in place and create symlinks only for regular files. >> >> This would certainly work. maemo-optify should have option which prevents >> it from creating directory links. > > Why would/should it be an option? From the sounds of it, it shouldn't > create directory symlinks; why would a package ever want them given > the problems it can cause?
Agreed. And I think the dpkg problem with symlinks replacing existing directories is a inherent to the way it unpacks the application. AFAIK dpkg upgrades packages in place, i.e. it first unpacks the new application and later removes the files that existed only in the old version (I might be wrong though). The files in the .deb (which is a simple archive file) are inside a "data.tar.gz" file, which is unpacked inplace on the root directory. You can see this by running "ar t" on any .deb file. It will list its "raw" contents. E.g.: $ ar t /var/cache/apt/archives/wget_1.10.2-3ubuntu1.1_i386.deb debian-binary control.tar.gz data.tar.gz I did an experiment that consisted on creating a tarball with a symlink called "d" and tried to unpack it on a directory with an existing "d" directory. If the directory is *empty*, tar simply removes the existing directory and unpacks the symlink. Now, if the directory is not empty, this is what happens: $ tar -xvf ../test.tar.gz ./ ./d tar: ./d: Cannot create symlink to `d2': File exists tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors Now why "tar" does not simply "rm -rf" the directory? I believe this is to avoid disasters if tarballs contains for instance a "/usr" symlink. Therefore, I think there is no way to guarantee that .deb packages with directory symlinks are installable UNLESS their preinst script explicitly removes non-empty directories with the same path as the symlinks which, again, is very dangerous IMHO. Regards, -- Anderson Lizardo OpenBossa Labs - INdT Manaus - Brazil _______________________________________________ maemo-developers mailing list maemo-developers@maemo.org https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-developers
