Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Sat, 27 Apr 2002 10:20:10 -0700 (PDT)
From:      John Polstra <jdp@polstra.com>
To:        hubs@freebsd.org
Cc:        dl@leo.org
Subject:   Re: symlink problems with cvsup
Message-ID:  <200204271720.g3RHKAn24509@vashon.polstra.com>
In-Reply-To: <20020422214404.GA11770@atrbg11.informatik.tu-muenchen.de>
References:  <20010423143759.3213A3F45@bast.unixathome.org> <20020422214404.GA11770@atrbg11.informatik.tu-muenchen.de>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
In article <20020422214404.GA11770@atrbg11.informatik.tu-muenchen.de>,
Daniel Lang  <dl@leo.org> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Dan Langille wrote on Mon, Apr 22, 2002 at 02:37:09PM -0400:
> [..]
> > I was running out of disk space on one volume on cvsup.nz.freebsd.org so I 
> > moved away part of the repo to another disk.
> > 
> > Now I have this:
> [..]
> > lrwxr-xr-x   1 root     cvsupin    30 Apr 22 17:58 doc -> 
> > /usr/symlinks/ncvs-FreeBSD-doc
> [..]
> > CVSup update begins at 2002-04-23 06:15:03
> > Updating from cvsup-master.freebsd.org
> > Connected to cvsup-master.freebsd.org
> > Updating collection cvs-all/cvs
> > "doc" should be a directory, but is a symlink to a directory -- check your 
> > prefix setting
> 
> It seems to cause no problems. My Prefix-root even is a symlink
> (prefixes/FreeBSD.cvs is a symlink to
> /pub/FreeBSD/development/FreeBSD-CVS)
> 
> I get the same warning message, but it does not seem to cause
> a problem. Maybe John (cc'd) can clarify the impact or
> severety of this.

If you have a symlink inside the collection where CVSup expects a
directory it can cause problems in some cases.  CVSup tries to mirror
things exactly, and that includes the property of whether something is
a symbolic link or not.  I changed it from an error to a special case
with a warning in response to some complaints about that, but it's not
foolproof.  The warning is there for a reason, and if you see it you
should seriously consider rearranging your filesystems.  There are
certain kinds of obscure updates that can happen which will cause it
to remove your symbolic link and replace it with a real directory.

It is OK for the "prefix=" in the supfile to refer to a symbolic
link.  The cvsup-mirror port takes advantage of that.  I have never
seen that produce the warning, and I don't think it should.  The
only dangerous thing is to have symbolic links _inside_ a
collection.

There should probably be an option to make CVSup follow all symbolic
links on the client side.  You'd then lose the ability to mirror
symbolic links, obviously, but that's OK for a CVS repository.

John
-- 
  John Polstra
  John D. Polstra & Co., Inc.                        Seattle, Washington USA
  "Disappointment is a good sign of basic intelligence."  -- Chögyam Trungpa


To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-hubs" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200204271720.g3RHKAn24509>