2021-04-12 19:12 UTC+02:00, home user mattisonw@comcast.net:
(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"?
I don't know, but maybe a script that checks if the link belongs to a package, and only removes it if it doesn't. But I'm not sure it's worth the hassle. (Especially that that output of symlinks is not very useful in a script. As far as I can see, one would have to extract the filename from it using a(n adimittedly, probably quite simple) regexp.)
(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?
I'm not an expert but I'm pretty sure it's not.
What good, valid purpose is there for a package to have a dangling symlink? Or maybe "hunspell" needs a little clean-up?
Probably no and yes. But it's not just hunspell. Far from it!
Andras