[gobolinux-devel] Problems with /System/Index

[Lucas C. Villa Real]

On 2/5/07, Jonatan Liljedahl <lijon at kymatica.com> wrote:
> Carlo Calica wrote:
> > On 2/4/07, Lucas C. Villa Real <lucasvr at gobolinux.org> wrote:
> >> Hello all,
> >>
> >> Everything is fine, until the installer tries to perform some
> >> operation with symlinks, such as 'ln -s libc.so.6 libc.so'. Since
> >> libc.so already exists in /System/Index/lib and no '--force' flag was
> >> passed to ln, the link creation will fail, as well as the install
> >> procedure.
> >>
> >
> > How is this different from a normal "make install" on an other distro
> > where /lib/libc.so already exists (from an earlier version)?
>
> Exactly, is there any difference? If not, then all "normal" distro's
> would have the same problem and then this is not a problem with the /S/I
> thing but with bad build systems that doesn't work if a previous
> installation already exists.
>
> I used to run Slackware before gobo, where everything was just installed
> right in /lib and /usr/lib, etc... And I can't remember having this
> problem ever.
>
> Isn't those symlinking stuff supposed to do ln -sf, or remove the old
> symlink before creating the new one? (If I remember correctly, unionfs
> allows one to "remove" files from the RO dir by adding 'blanks' in the
> RW dir, but perhaps this has to be enabled?)

The problem itself is not tied to program's symlinks, but with the
fact that this implementation was based on symlinks
(LinkOrExpandAll.c), which creates symlinks to files/directories. This
is not true in distributions such as Slackware: there will be
directories and real files instead, and the installer will not get
confused with things like this.  Symlinks created by 'make install'
doesn't seem to be the real problem here, sorry for the confusion.

I'm going to write a UnionSymlinkProgram tonight to be used by this
implementation and will see if that works fine. I expect to be
commiting these experimental features soon in the CVS then (today or
tomorrow) so that others can hack on this too.

-- 
Lucas
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