[pacman-dev] Bump on upgrade046.py

Nagy Gabor ngaba at bibl.u-szeged.hu
Sun May 31 16:16:37 EDT 2009


> ... (probably due to the symlink bug) ...
> 
> I guess, I've just run into the file relocation bug (otherwise, we have
> a more serious bug here), showed by upgrade046.py. Briefly, the file
> relocation check is hacked into the fileconflict check, which is omitted
> with -f.

Even if -f checked file relocation, that operation still would be
dangerous. (Even if the user is sure that the fileconflict induced -f is
a false alarm!) File relocation may not be detected (this can be a
reason of the false alarm) - this can happen around symlinks again.

symdir -> dir in the following example:
sync/foo contains symdir/file, local/foo doesn't.
local/bar contains dir/file, sync/bar doesn't.
We assume, that -Suf upgrades both foo and bar. In this case file
relocation cannot be detected (atm), so if bar is upgraded after foo,
'file' will be deleted. :-(

Unfortunately this situation can happen without -f, too. Fortunately,
this is very rare: If the user deletes file in our example, the
fileconflict check won't catch anything (neither fileconflict, nor file
relocation), but during the upgrade of bar file will be deleted.

Conclusion 1.: -f is a much more dangerous operation than the end-user
may suspect, maybe we should update the manual of --force a bit.
Conclusion 2.: Deleting files of a package is not recommended. In this
case pacman's fileconflict and file relocation check is fooled (we do
NOT compare local filelist versus target filelist).
Conclusion 3.: From package manager viewpoint, remove all local target
packages then install all the new ones is much better. However, this is
much more dangerous (interrupted operation).
Conclusion 4.: Without real transaction system (FS#8585), we have some
~unsolvable issues.




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