Fedora 17’s unified filesystem (/usr-move)

[James Antill]

On Tue, 2012-01-31 at 10:52 -0500, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> Bill Nottingham (notting at redhat.com) said: 
> > Miloslav Trmač (mitr at volny.cz) said: 
> > > On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 1:06 AM, Martin Langhoff
> > > <martin.langhoff at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > >>  But you can add:
> > > >>
> > > >> Provides: /bin/foo
> > > >
> > > > Ugh! Will that be needed that across the distro for a release or two?
> > > 
> > > http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=commitdiff;h=09220fef36dcc2fe06bd858578119872f889c7e2
> > 
> > That should not be needed.
> 
> To be precise:
> 
> [root at nostromo ~]# mv /bin /cow
> [root at nostromo ~]# /cow/ln -s /cow /bin
> [root at nostromo ~]# rpm -qf /cow/bash
> bash-4.2.20-1.fc16.x86_64
> [root at nostromo ~]# rpm -qf /bin/bash
> bash-4.2.20-1.fc16.x86_64
> 
> rpm should already handle this, no need for the provides.

 Good to see everyone still doesn't read what I write.

 As I said, rpm _does something_ to make the above work for -qf (the
above even works if you inside /cow ... as long as the /bin symlink
exists!).
 However, it _does not_ work, if you put the above in package
provides/requires and try to install them. Eg.

http://james.fedorapeople.org/yum/sym1.spec
http://james.fedorapeople.org/yum/sym2.spec

...you _cannot_ install these packages, even via. local only rpm.

 Also, even if someone could fix rpm to work this out, making this work
at the yum layer is _much_ harder ... because the repodata does not
currently specify that /path/to/blah is a regular file or a symlink (and
if it's a symlink, what it points to).

 So the coreutils provides _are needed_ (along with all others), or the
coreutils package has to "lie" and say it is installing the packages
into a dir. /bin.