On 4/12/21 11:12 AM, home user wrote:
(context) In the "invisible application after upgrade" thread, Ed did not know how I did my upgrade to f33. I responded that I mostly followed the Fedora upgrade instructions from here: "https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/dnf-system-upgrade/", and listed the sequence of commands that I did. That included the steps symlinks -r /usr | grep dangling symlinks -r -d /usr from the "Clean-Up Old Symlinks" section. Andras responded that
This isn't necessarily a good idea, because those dangling symlinks may belong to their respective packages. If so, removing them will compromise the integrity of the package they belong to.
If Andras is correct, then the upgrade instructions need to be changed. Based on past experience, when a bug is submitted against Fedora documentation, the Fedora documentation team will want suggestions on how the document should be worded.
(question 1) What should the instructions say? Is there a better yet easy and safe way to find and clean out dangling symlinks? Maybe more detail should accompany "After you verify the list of broken symlinks"?
(question 2) In a later post, Andras provided and example of a dangling symlink (in the "hunspell" package) that should not be deleted. When I was a C/C++ programmer (a long long time ago, in a galaxy far far away), dangling pointers (and memory leaks) were naughty; they can cause serious problems. Isn't a dangling symlink a file system parallel to a dangling pointer in a C/C++ program? What good, valid purpose is there for a package to have a dangling symlink? Or maybe "hunspell" needs a little clean-up?
Having read 5 responses, my impression thus far is that the best change to request in the upgrade instructions is to either remove the "Clean-Up Old Symlinks" section altogether or make no changes at all.