[pacman-dev] difficult symlink "puzzle"

[Charles Mauch]

Greetings from Tacoma, WA, USA, only 2,668 cars stolen last year, Xavier!
On Friday, June 29, in the 2007th year of our Lord, you wrote:

> (with perl last), so that shouldn't cause any problems.
>
> Anyway, that's maybe not ideal, but pacman has always worked fine that 
> way (not overwriting dir symlinks), while the current behavior of 
> deleting symlinks break everything.
>
>> As a hotfix: file conflict error would be best imho.
>
> hm, I'm not sure what you mean here :) 
> Just fail if there is a symlink on filesystem instead of a directory ? 
> I'm not sure people with an /opt symlink will be more happy with this behavior. 
> Same for all these perl packages.

Just popping in for a 2 second clarification. ;)

Most perl modules in arch are current installed into
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl (arch dependendent modules) and
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/current (arch independent modules).

The reason for the symlink farm is because the archlinux _perl_ package is
compiled to only look in /usr/lib/perl5/x.x.x/ for modules.  Packages which
install modules into /usr/lib/perl5/x.x.x are misbehaving, or at least
misbehaving to archlinux convention.

Pacman should not replace /usr/lib/perl5/x.x.x/ with a directory, but any
package installing modules into that path are broken anyway. ;)

I've been working on http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Perl_Policy which
hopefully will provide some standarization.  Not a lot of interest so far
though.  I think most people interested in perl+archlinux use my perlcpan
repository anyway.

-- 
Take it easy, Charles

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