File conflict when upgrading package

[Sandro Mani]

On 18.11.2013 09:48, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> On 11/18/2013 10:27 AM, Florian Weimer wrote:
>> On 11/18/2013 12:44 AM, Mattias Ellert wrote:
>>> sön 2013-11-17 klockan 22:12 +0100 skrev Sandro Mani:
>>>> Upgrading from xflr5-6.09.05-4.fc21.x86_64 to
>>>> xflr5-6.09.05-5.fc21.x86_64 however fails with
>>>> Transaction check error:
>>>>      file /usr/share/applications/xflr5.desktop from install of
>>>> xflr5-6.09.05-5.fc21.x86_64 conflicts with file from
>>>> package xflr5-6.09.05-4.fc21.x86_64
>>>
>>> You are replacing a directory with an ordinary file. The requires a
>>> %pretrans script. %pretrans scripts must be written in lua:
>>>
>>> %pretrans -p <lua>
>>> st = posix.stat("%{_datadir}/applications/%{name}.desktop")
>>> if st and st.type == "directory" then
>>>    os.execute("rm -rf %{_datadir}/applications/%{name}.desktop")
>>> end
>>
>> Wow.  Shouldn't RPM support this out of the box?
>
> Should? Sure, it seems like an obvious thing on the surface, but 
> replacing directories within a transaction is very complicated due to 
> removals happening after installs (and rpm's file fingerprinting 
> semantics).
>
> The new thing here is that rpm >= 4.11 detects and reports the 
> (unsupported) attempt to replace a directory with something else as a 
> conflict, previously it just barfed up with "cpio: rename failed - Is 
> a directory" error in middle of transaction.
>
> An easier-than-pretrans-hack workaround is to just use a different 
> filename for the file replacing the directory.
>
>     - Panu -
Thank you all.