[Gerald Combs <gerald@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 20 Oct 2003, Alex Fontana wrote:

> I recently installed ethereal-0.9.15-solaris2.8-sparc-local off the local archive, and I found that it destroyed my /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/lib directories.  Fortunately these were only symlinks, but I thought you guys might want to know.

"Destroyed" in what sense?  Were the actual directories that
/usr/local/bin and /usr/local/lib point to affected in any way?

The package information (prototype(4)) file used to create the packages
has the following entries:

d none /usr/local/lib 0755 root bin
d none /usr/local/bin 0755 root bin

The "d" at the beginning of each line indicates that each item should
be a directory.  Apparently the Solaris package installer _really_ wants
these to be directories, and clobbers anything that's not a directory with
the same name.  It looks like other people have run into this behavior:

    http://groups.google.com/groups?&selm=x71yyu3mkg.fsf%40mitra.com
    http://groups.google.com/groups?th=38827a44f2e2b6f5

I'm not sure this can be fixed on our end.  Removing /usr/local/lib and
/usr/local/bin from the prototype file would break the installation on
systems that don't have those directories.