Gerald Combs wrote:
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.
I *think* I've seen that Solaris' 'pkgadd' will still install if some
directories don't exist (and aren't in the pkgmap), but it will issue a
warning about an "implied directory" or some such... (Don't know what
it would do about permissions, though.)