Comment 10 for bug 7420

Message-ID: <email address hidden>
Date: Wed, 18 Aug 2004 13:37:16 +0200
From: Robert Millan <email address hidden>
To: Joey Hess <email address hidden>
Cc: <email address hidden>, <email address hidden>
Subject: Re: dh_link failure

On Wed, Aug 18, 2004 at 09:30:34AM +0100, Joey Hess wrote:
> Robert Millan wrote:
> > Please could you have a look at #265414 ? Looks to me like dh_link is too
> > restrictive. Did you add the directory check recently?
>
> dh_link has never supported a destination that is an existing directory
> because the correct behavior is unclear. Some users expect the existing
> directory to be rm -rf'd and replaced with a symlink. Some expect a
> symlink to land inside the destination directory. The latter behavior
> was the behavior of dh_link until 4.1.67, when I learned that the
> behavior existed, and was broken, and disabled it. The behavior you want
> has never been the behavior of dh_link. It is closer to correct
> behavior, but given than there could still be packages that expect the
> old behavior, I prefer to leave the error message in for a while to give
> them time to be fixed.

Ok that was pretty clarifying. Could you document this with your explanation?
I suggest adding a note to the manpage and refer to it in the error message.

--
Robert Millan

(Debra and Ian) (Gnu's Not (UNiplexed Information and Computing System))/\
(kernel of *(Berkeley Software Distribution))