Michael Spang <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Package: lintian
> Version: 1.23.15
> Severity: normal
> The following lintian error occured during the testing of a package I am
> preparing:
> E: firefox-greasemonkey: symlink-should-be-absolute
> usr/lib/firefox/extensions/{e4a8a97b-f2ed-450b-b12d-ee082ba24781}
> ../../../../share/mozilla-extensions/greasemonkey
> And, after making it absolute:
> E: firefox-greasemonkey: symlink-should-be-relative
> usr/lib/firefox/extensions/{e4a8a97b-f2ed-450b-b12d-ee082ba24781}
> /usr/share/mozilla-extensions/greasemonkey
> The first of these is obviously wrong. After further testing I realized
> that the symlink ascended one too many levels and was broken. Lintian
> erronously reported that a broken relative symlink (which should be
> relative) should be made absolute. It might be wise to add a broken
> symlink error or warning.
I'm pretty sure lintian's behavior here is correct. That message isn't
because the symlink is broken; it's because of exactly the problem that
you discovered. It ascended one too many levels, which means that it was
actually a symlink to:
/share/mozilla-extensions/greasemonkey
Since the symlink was in /usr and was pointing to a file in /share, it
correctly triggered the lintian error about relative symlinks between
top-level directories.
When you changed it to an absolute symlink, you of course fixed where it
was pointing to, and lintian then complained that it should be relative.
The circumstances under which you arrived at the error ended up being
rather confusing, but I think that lintian was always telling you the
truth. lintian cannot in general warn about dangling symlinks since it's
not uncommon to have the target of the symlink provided by another package
(think development packages for shared libraries, for instance, but there
are other cases).
--
Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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