[Fedora-packaging] Absolute symlinks

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Mon, 2006-08-21 at 23:21 -0500, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
> rpmlint spits symlink-should-be-relative warnings when it sees an
> absolute symlink, and generally folks have fixed things up when
> presented with the warning.  But now I've hit a review where the
> packager thinks an absolute symlink is appropriate and I'm not sure
> whether it's really an issue.  

Here's rpmlint's reasoning: 
  'Absolute symlinks are problematic eg. when working with chroot
environments.'

I don't know that this is a blocker (the symlinks will work within the
chroot environment but trying to access the symlinks from outside the
chroot will do the wrong thing [access the system file rather than the
one inside the chroot.])

So what's the package and what's the reasoning?  If the package can be
broken with relative symlinks but absolute symlinks work 100% then that
would swing the balance towards using absolute symlinks.  If it really
boils down to the packager thinking his application is special then I
think rpmlint is right in this case.

> The guidelines are silent on the
> subject; the only mention I see of it is in the mono guidelines, which
> say:
> 
> ----
> Mono installs binaries in /usr/lib/<package>/bin with symlinks back to
> /usr/bin. rpmlint is not happy with this and generates an error (which
> is the correct behaviour).
> ----
IIRC, PFJ ran across an rpmlint warning here that isn't about symlinks
but about Mono applications installing to /usr/lib/<package>/bin.  I
think the wording needs to be changed here too, as last I looked, the
"symlinks back to /usr/bin" are actually wrapper scripts in %{_bindir}
pointing to the program file in %{_libdir}/<package>/bin/<program>.

-Toshio