[Guidelines Change] Changes to the Packaging Guidelines

[Kevin Kofler]

Panu Matilainen wrote:
> Right. CLEARLY this would've been Just The Thing to do when /bin changed
> from a directory to a /usr/bin symlink. Right?

That UsrMove nonsense was just the wrong thing to do altogether, we are 
still suffering the consequences of the mess, as evidenced by that other 
guideline about packages installing to /bin vs. /usr/bin.

As I wrote in my other reply, you cannot rename the directory away if it 
contains files owned by other packages that are not being removed in the 
transaction. When replacing the directory with a file, that case should be 
treated like a file conflict and fail the transaction. When replacing the 
directory with a symlink to another directory, we could be smart and try to 
merge the 2 directories like the dracut convertfs plugin does, but even if 
we would still get an error in that particular case, it'd still be an 
improvement over the status quo.

The cases we keep running into are cases where the directory ONLY contains 
files from packages about to be removed (and possibly random unowned crap 
thrown in by the local sysadmin, which RPM is also happy to trash in other 
situations, so keeping it in a renamed directory is already being nice).

        Kevin Kofler