Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Zac Medico <zmedico@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: rfc: locations of binaries and separate /usr
Date: Mon, 02 Jan 2012 06:45:13
Message-Id: 4F015251.9050804@gentoo.org
In Reply to: [gentoo-dev] Re: rfc: locations of binaries and separate /usr by Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net>
1 On 01/01/2012 09:39 PM, Duncan wrote:
2 > Olivier CrĂȘte posted on Sun, 01 Jan 2012 15:17:50 -0500 as excerpted:
3 >
4 >> On Sun, 2012-01-01 at 12:46 -0600, William Hubbs wrote:
5 >>> I don't think the /{bin,sbin,lib} and /usr/sbin directories should be
6 >>> deleted.
7 >>>
8 >>> However, what I would like to see is that the package maintainers would
9 >>> be responsible for creating any compatibility symlinks their package
10 >>> needs, not portage. I don't think it is a good idea to have portage or
11 >>> any package manager controling the migration.
12 >>
13 >> The other option is to do mv /bin/* /sbin/* /usr/sbin/* /usr/bin; and
14 >> then create symlinks from the other dirs to /usr/bin.. That can be done
15 >> in big move, it's the way Fedora is going to do it.
16 >
17 > That's what I had in mind, and in fact have already been thinking about
18 > trying, here.
19 >
20 > Which is why I don't really like the idea of packages placing symlinks,
21 > since then it'd likely be the symlink copied last, overwriting the actual
22 > binary with the symlink... pointing at itself due to the symlinked dirs!
23 >
24 > Which is why I suggested a portage feature that would detect such
25 > collisions and die before installing them, potentially overwriting the
26 > binary with a symlink to itself!
27
28 It should not be a problem because merge of symlinks is automatically
29 delayed in cases when the symlink target doesn't exist yet. There's a
30 loop where it merges as many regular files as it can, and if there are
31 any symlinks that can't be resolved then it merges them after all the
32 regular files have been merged.
33 --
34 Thanks,
35 Zac