[pacman-dev] Remove directory symlink support in pacman-4.2 - Was: Use resolved paths for filelist operations

[Andrew Gregory]

On Mon, 18 Feb 2013 14:46:14 +1000
Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:

> > Sorry, I meant that one of the packages has a directory that exists on
> > the filesystem as a symlink, for example:
> > 
> > filesystem:
> > /lib -> /usr/lib
> > 
> > pkg1:
> > /lib/foo
> > 
> > pkg2:
> > /usr/lib/foo
> > 
> > Without resolving /lib/foo we wouldn't be able to detect the conflict
> > until we started committing the transaction and actually tried to
> > extract the files.
> 
> 
> If we removed the handling of symlinks for directories that would be
> detected as a conflict (/lib symlink on filesystem vs /lib directory in
> pkg1).
> 
> 

Ah.  I guess I didn't fully understand the extent of what you were
suggesting.  So pacman would not allow any deviation from what the
packages provide?  That does sound much easier.

The only use case I can think of would be people wanting to try merging
directories (/bin and /usr/bin for example) without having to rebuild
all the necessary packages first.