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Re: 1.7 setup.exe overwrites softlink for home




From: Corinna Vinschen Date: Tue, 6 Apr 2010 10:28:51 +0200


On Apr 4 14:55, Peter Wohlers wrote:
Since upgrading to 1.7, I keep seeing weird problems with deletion
of my homedir symlink.

Before running setup:
pwohlers@h1n1 ~
$ ll /
[...]
lrwxrwxrwx   1 Domain Users     18 2010-04-04 14:31 home ->
/cygdrive/d/Users/
[...]
After running setup:
[...]
Setup seems to have deleted the softlink for /home

Well... yes. That's probably a bit unfortunate. The current mechanism always creates a couple of directories if they don't already exist:

  /bin
  /home
  /etc
  /lib
  /tmp
  /usr
  /usr/bin
  /usr/lib
  /usr/src
  /usr/local
  /usr/local/bin
  /usr/local/etc
  /usr/local/lib
  /usr/tmp
  /var/log
  /var/run
  /var/tmp

If the directory couldn't be created because a non-directory file uses
the same name, it deletes that file and tries to create the directory
again.  It's not perfect, but at least we know that the directories
exist, afterwards.  We could add a mode which drops the aggressive
creation strategy, but I only see that *could* make sense for home.

OK. Just curious as this seems to be a departure from previous versions' behaviors, so I wasn't sure if this was something new to 1.7, or merely pilot-error.

Is there something magical about the /home symlink that now needs to
be handled with fstab?  Or is it something else?

Nothing "magic", it's just the current state of affairs. Creating a /home mount point is certainly a good workaround, and it should even be a bit faster than a symlink.


Thanks for validation of workaround.

Gratefully,

Peter Wohlers


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