On Mon, 2006-08-21 at 23:21 -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. But now I've hit a review where the
packager thinks an absolute symlink is appropriate and I'm not sure
whether it's really an issue.
Here's rpmlint's reasoning:
'Absolute symlinks are problematic eg. when working with chroot
environments.'
I don't know that this is a blocker (the symlinks will work within the
chroot environment but trying to access the symlinks from outside the
chroot will do the wrong thing [access the system file rather than the
one inside the chroot.])
So what's the package and what's the reasoning? If the package can be
broken with relative symlinks but absolute symlinks work 100% then that
would swing the balance towards using absolute symlinks. If it really
boils down to the packager thinking his application is special then I
think rpmlint is right in this case.
The guidelines are silent on the
subject; the only mention I see of it is in the mono guidelines, which
say:
----
Mono installs binaries in /usr/lib/<package>/bin with symlinks back to
/usr/bin. rpmlint is not happy with this and generates an error (which
is the correct behaviour).
----
IIRC, PFJ ran across an rpmlint warning here that isn't about symlinks
but about Mono applications installing to /usr/lib/<package>/bin. I
think the wording needs to be changed here too, as last I looked, the
"symlinks back to /usr/bin" are actually wrapper scripts in %{_bindir}
pointing to the program file in %{_libdir}/<package>/bin/<program>.
-Toshio