Bug#356307: lintian: wrong error messages for broken symlinks
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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Bug#356307: lintian: wrong error messages for broken symlinks
Russ Allbery wrote: Michael Spang [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: 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). Ah, that makes perfect sense. I'm not sure why I didn't realize this myself. Sorry for the noise. I guess you should close this report. ;-) Thanks! Michael Spang -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Bug#356307: lintian: wrong error messages for broken symlinks
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.
Thanks!
Michael Spang
-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.16-rc5-git3
Locale: LANG=en_US, LC_CTYPE=en_US (charmap=ISO-8859-1)
Versions of packages lintian depends on:
ii binutils 2.16.1cvs20060117-1 The GNU assembler, linker and bina
ii diffstat 1.41-1 produces graph of changes introduc
ii dpkg-dev 1.13.16 package building tools for Debian
ii file 4.15-2 Determines file type using magic
ii gettext 0.14.5-2GNU Internationalization utilities
ii intltool-debian 0.34.1+20050828 Help i18n of RFC822 compliant conf
ii libparse-debianchang 1.0-1 parse Debian changelogs and output
ii man-db 2.4.3-3 The on-line manual pager
ii perl [libdigest-md5- 5.8.8-2 Larry Wall's Practical Extraction
lintian recommends no packages.
-- no debconf information
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