[Fedora-packaging] Broken Symlinks

[Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski]

On Thursday, 23 April 2015 at 06:51, John Dodson wrote:
> 
> Hi list,
> I'm new to this list but have had a hard time convincing redhat people that
> broken symlinks are bad! (I'm not going to bother trying to convice you ;-)

I believe kernel package maintainers have more pressing concerns than a
few dangling links, but if you sent a patch that fixes the issue, they
might just take it.

> What I would like to do is get a "package" to take responsibility for the many
> broken symlinks out there. So that at least a broken symlink can be assigned to
> a specific package the owner of which thinks (sic) that the symlink is
> "required" from his/her perspective. (I won't say that the code should be more
> intelligent & create a symlink if it is really necessary & remove it when it's
> broken as that would expect too much)
> 
> Please see,
> 
> 	https://access.redhat.com/support/cases/#/case/01326479
> 
> for more detail.
> 
> Generally many packages create symlinks, but don't "own them", I'd like to
> change that. eg. kernel packagages if the source is not installed.
> 
> Try,	find / -type l -exec file "{}" \; |grep broken

Judging by https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1185918 , they
are not actually unowned at least in the kernel package. You could send
a patch to move them to kernel-devel subpackage, but you need to ensure
that you don't cause any breakage between package upgrades.

Are there any other packages that create broken symlinks but don't have
them listed in their %files sections? That would be against the current
packaging guidelines.

I guess you'd like to add a rule saying that all symlinks installed
by a package must point at existing files (either from the same package
or from one of the dependencies). Arguably, such a rule exists already:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Guidelines?rd=Packaging/Guidelines#FileAndDirectoryOwnership
[...]
Your package should own all of the files that are installed as part of
the %install process.
[...]

Regards,
Dominik
-- 
Fedora http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Rathann
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"Faith manages."
        -- Delenn to Lennier in Babylon 5:"Confessions and Lamentations"