[Fedora-packaging] Re: Absolute symlinks

[Axel Thimm]

On Tue, Aug 22, 2006 at 09:48:31AM -0500, Rex Dieter wrote:
> Axel Thimm wrote:
> >On Mon, Aug 21, 2006 at 11:21:41PM -0500, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
> >>rpmlint spits symlink-should-be-relative warnings when it sees an
> >>absolute symlink, and generally folks have fixed things up when
> >>presented with the warning.
> >
> >what is the rationale behind preferring relative to absolute symlinks
> >(unless relative means in the same folder)? I would even prefer it the
> >other way around to avoid breakage.
> 
> depends on your definition of breakage, whether the package is 
> relocatable (not that we worry too much about that), whether the target 
> of the symlink is in *this* pkg, etc... (:

Dangling symlinks break with relative and absolute links, but relative
symlinks break whenever "folder/.." != ".", which is the case for
symlinked folders.

Example: Suppose you'd like to have /var/mail/foo link to /var/bar and
do that with ../bar, you'll end up at /var/spool/bar instead.

Symlinks in the filesystem as shipped are admittedly scarce, but it
happens quite often to me that my system partition explodes and I need
to move something over to a data partition symlinking it back. That
would break relative symlinks, too.

Relative symlinks w/o "..", e.g. starting in the same folder, don't
break, though.
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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