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