Re: [gentoo-dev] pkg_{pre,post}inst misusage

[Jason Stubbs]

On Friday 23 December 2005 22:13, Harald van Dijk wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 23, 2005 at 10:00:20PM +0900, Jason Stubbs wrote:
> > On Friday 23 December 2005 21:39, Harald van Dijk wrote:
> > > On Fri, Dec 23, 2005 at 08:31:06PM +0900, Jason Stubbs wrote:
> > > > On Friday 23 December 2005 20:19, Stefan Schweizer wrote:
> > > > > Well, you should know that those are because of portage bugs or
> > > > > some portage peculiarity, read the corresponding bugs for example
> > > > > for cups to find out more.
> > > >
> > > > Can you point me to a bug? There's no mention in the ChangeLog that I
> > > > can see nor in the ebuilds themselves...
> > >
> > > Bug #99375 is mentioned in the changelog for samba.
> >
> > Okay. It appears to be something related to symlinks. Can you show me the
> > bug assigned to portage that reports this and/or shows how to reproduce
> > it?
>
> Don't know if it's been reported as a portage bug, but this would show
> it:
>
> KEYWORDS="~x86"
> src_install() {
> 	dodir /test
> 	dosym /usr/bin /test
> }
>
> When unmerging, portage won't remove /test/bin because its target still
> exists.

Seeing that there's no bug filed for this, discussion can go here; that's no 
existance of a portage bug is of itself no reason to put an ugly workaround 
in the ebuilds themselves mind you.

Symlinks are handled within portage differently to regular files. Regular 
files get an mtime check and are removed if it matches. Symlinks don't get an 
mtime check (even thought the mtime is stored) and are only removed if the 
symlink's target doesn't exist. Hence, it seems to be this way by design. Why 
it's this way? Who knows. It's been that way for longer than anyone can 
remember which is why _it's so important that bugs get filed_.

A quick patch makes symlinks handled similarly to regular files and solves the 
issue. I'll put it into testing unless anybody can come up with a reason not 
to. The case that will be broken by the patch is when two different packages 
install the same symlink.　PackageA is installed, PackageB is installed, 
PackageB is uninstalled -> PackageA is broken. Does this case exist?

--
Jason Stubbs

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