[pacman-dev] [PATCH 0/8] remove symlink support

[Allan McRae]

On 29/04/13 02:33, Dave Reisner wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 29, 2013 at 12:41:50AM +1000, Allan McRae wrote:
>> On 27/04/13 10:00, Andrew Gregory wrote:
>>> Two weeks with no objections, so here is the full patchset.  Several of the
>>> tests should be redundant now, but I left them in with updated rules anyway,
>>> just in case.
>>
>> Thanks - patches look good to me.  I made a couple of comments on them.
>>
>> What we also need to figure out is the upgrade path here.  There are
>> packages in the Arch repos with files in /lib/...  relying on the
>> symlink at the moment.  They will create conflicts after these patches
>> (which is fine), but we need to make sure they will upgrade fine to the
>> fixed versions.  (They might already - but needs tested.)
>>
>>
>> @Dan, @Dave (or anyone else...):  Do you intend to comment on this
>> proposal?  Even an "ack" would be appreciated here.
>>
> 
> As I mentioned to you on IRC yesterday, I'm still concerned that this is
> going to break my install pretty hard with /bin and /sbin symlinked to
> usr/bin. I've had this running for the past year or so without too many
> problems.
> 

Is that an objection?   Every time there is a package in Arch with a
file in /usr/bin and a symlink in /bin your system gets "broken".  I'll
also point out that you could only do this for that period of time
because you were using the git version of pacman.

Anyway, I'm guessing there are two problems here:

1) Your local database does not match what is on your filesystem.  As
our conflict checking assumes the local db to be right, this will
probably miss conflicts.  So we need to correct the local db for anyone
who is currently using this "feature".   This falls into the category of
figuring out an upgrade path.

2) When the local db is right, programs with files in /bin will cause
conflicts until Arch officially does that set up.  That I do not
consider a pacman problem and you will just need to add them to your
rebuild list for this setup.  I'd say this is not a pacman issue.

Allan