The media-plugins/alsa-plugins-1.2.2 ebuild creates a link /etc/alsa/conf.d/51-pulseaudio-probe.conf which is a symbolic link to a relative path: /etc/alsa/conf.d/51-pulseaudio-probe.conf -> ../../../usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf.d/51-pulseaudio-probe.conf That the link belongs to this package can be seen with equery belongs /etc/alsa/conf.d/51-pulseaudio-probe.conf whose output is: * Searching for /etc/alsa/conf.d/51-pulseaudio-probe.conf ... media-plugins/alsa-plugins-1.2.2 (/etc/alsa/conf.d/51-pulseaudio-probe.conf -> ../../../usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf.d/51-pulseaudio-probe.conf) The problem - i.e. the bug - here is this: If /etc is itself a symbolic link /etc -> /some/other/dir/etc then the relative path above ../../../usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf.d/51-pulseaudio-probe.conf will point to something that does not exist and the output of 'll': ll /etc/alsa/conf.d/51-pulseaudio-probe.conf lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 60 May 14 10:39 /etc/alsa/conf.d/51-pulseaudio-probe.conf -> ../../../usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf.d/51-pulseaudio-probe.conf will be in a blinking red color, even if the file /usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf.d/51-pulseaudio-probe.conf does exist! Solution -------- Create the link with an absolute path, not relative. Or, if you want to avoid problems with absolute paths in symbolic links (these confuse me and my backup scripts sometimes :-)), you should at least find the absolute path of /etc with readlink /etc count the levels up to / and set the appropriate number of '../' in the relative link you want to create. You should not force users to *not* implement their /etc as a symbolic link to somewhere else. I have been using it this way for at least 20 years without problems.
You can probably bind-mount your custom /etc if you like. I do not think a /etc symlink will ever work, there are also make.profile symlink and ssl certificates and maybe other stuff you will have to fight.
(In reply to Igor V. Kovalenko from comment #1) > You can probably bind-mount your custom /etc if you like. > > I do not think a /etc symlink will ever work, there are also make.profile > symlink and ssl certificates and maybe other stuff you will have to fight. Yep, and relative symlinks make supporting Prefixes etc a lot easier.