Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 20 Jul 1997 22:07:33 -0400 | From | "Theodore Y. Ts'o" <> | Subject | Re: Don't run "dpkg" or "dselect" under 2.1.4[45] (was Re: 2.1.45: chmod -R causes reboot) |
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From: buhr@stat.wisc.edu (Kevin Buhr) Date: 20 Jul 1997 14:25:14 -0500
Don't run "dpkg" or "dselect" under 2.1.44 or 2.1.45. Both these kernels follow symlinks on "sys_rmdir", "sys_rename", and "sys_chown". The first breaks "dpkg" most severely, since "dpkg" absolutely relies on a "rmdir" of a symlink returning ENOTDIR. The second is nasty too, since "dpkg", when installing a symlink "blahblah", creates the symlink "blahblah.dpkg-new" and then renames it to "blahblah". The "sys_chown" problem is mostly minor, but if "dpkg" installs a dangling symlink, it'll die when the chown of the symlink unexpectedly fails.
If you care about dpkg being portable to US's other than Linux (one of the areas where rpm does a better job that dpkg, IMO), don't count on the symantics of rmdir and chown on symlinks. At least some versions of Unix will dereference symlinks for chown.
- Ted
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