[Fedora-packaging] Re: Summary of the 2009-01-06 Packaging Committee meeting

[Jeremy Katz]

On Tue, 2009-01-06 at 13:16 -0600, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
> * Use of absolute symlinks in packages -
>   http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackagingDrafts/Absolute_symlinks_in_fonts_templates_%282009-01-02%29
>  o Turns out that rpm can be made to convert all symlinks to relative
>    ones transparently, so that's being experimented with first.

So, at least as it stands right now, this can't easily be done with
symlinks(8)

symlinks -c will convert an absolute into a relative link, but the
problem is that the absolute link is something like
    /usr/bin/barz -> /usr/bin/foo

Since /usr/bin/foo only exists under $RPM_BUILD_ROOT,
$RPM_BUILD_ROOT/usr/bin/barz looks like a dangling symlink (there is no
real /usr/bin/foo) and thus symlinks won't convert it to a relative
symlink.

The thing that obviously pops to mind then would be to do a chroot into
$RPM_BUILD_ROOT, but that would a) require symlinks under
$RPM_BUILD_ROOT and b) require root to do chroot(2).

So to get this to work will at the very least require a fair bit more
scripting "fun" :/

Jeremy