fc4 ghost md5sums: a tale of woe

Rex Dieter rdieter at math.unl.edu
Fri Mar 31 12:48:08 UTC 2006


Matthew Miller wrote:
> I realize that FC4 is unexciting these days, so this may not generate much
> enthusiasm, but: how in the _world_ are you RH folks building updates for
> Fedora Core 4?
> 
> The story:
> 
> We need to make some local modifications to some of the files in the 'setup'
> package here at BU, and we were chasing ourselves in circles over making it
> not conflict with /var/log/lastlog also owned by util-linux.
> 
> Both of these packages have that file as a %ghost file, and last September,
> they were updated to have permissions of 0644. Specifically, there's
> 
>   %ghost %attr(0644,root,root) %verify(not md5 size mtime) /var/log/lastlog
> 
> in both files.
> 
> Okay, fine, that should work. And the packages in the FC4 updates area
> indeed both install without conflict.

In my experience, that does *not* work.  Sharing of files (whether their 
%ghost'd or not) *only* works if the original contents are *exactly* the 
same (timestamp, ownership, permissions, contents, md5sum, etc...).

-- Rex




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