GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 374861
Sabayon follows symlinks down the path.
Last modified: 2010-02-23 18:52:18 UTC
Please describe the problem: If you make symlinks inside a profile the resulted profile will consist of everything that is contained in those symlinks at the time of the saving. Symlinking for eg. mounted dirs is thus not a good idea. Steps to reproduce: 1. Create a new profile 2. Make a symlink on the desktop to a populated directory. 3. Check inside the resulting profile and you will find copies of the files from the symlinked directory. Actual results: Symlinks are followed and copied. Expected results: The symlinks being copied for all users but the data be left in its original place. Does this happen every time? Every time ive tried it. Other information:
I have also experienced this using Sabayon and can confirm this is a bug.
I wonder if this happens because we use zip files as the storage for user profiles. Zip files seem to have other problems as well --- they don't preserve file permissions.
I'm about to have a look at the code, but is their any reason to use zip files? Just wondering if bzip2 would be a better system to use, especially considering the compression is better and it's open source.
Zip files make it easy to pack and unpack individual files, which is what Sabayon does. I'm not completely sure that we actually need to be able to do that, though... the ProfileStorage is supposed to be an abstraction, and not to depend on a particular storage format. To handle symlinks, we could create something special in the "metadata" file.
Right, I've got this on my "todo" list. We need metadata stored for: Perms Owner Mode Symlink/Not Symlink etc. Assigning to me.
*** Bug 452373 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
http://git.gnome.org/browse/sabayon/commit/?id=51ab3829063416a7762c923125ac901481964380 Symlinks are now stored in metadata
Permissions were fixed in Bug #608825. Closing.