Bug 834600 – Ignore collisions if target symlink owned by same package

• Status: CONFIRMED
• Product: Portage Development

[Description Sam James 2022-03-05 08:00:56 UTC]

Right now, Portage can't handle overwriting a symlink with a directory, even if it knows that the package installed said symlink (no risk of overwriting something from the user then).

PMS says:
1) "Ebuilds must not attempt to merge a directory on top of any existing file that is not either a directory or a symlink to a directory." [0]
2) "Ebuilds must not attempt to merge a regular file on top of any existing file that is not either a regular file or a symlink to a regular file." [1]

The first bug I remember hitting this is android-studio (bug 815118) but I'm sure there's been some before that.

I don't think there were any substantial objections to this idea in that bug, other than it not being an immediate solution for that package given it needed to be implemented & propagate to users (and the same is true for Squid now).

[0] https://dev.gentoo.org/~ulm/pms/head/pms.html#x1-14000013.2
[1] https://dev.gentoo.org/~ulm/pms/head/pms.html#x1-14300013.3

[Comment 1 Sam James 2022-03-05 08:01:56 UTC]

To be clear: Portage currently will reject replacing a symlink to a directory with a directory and vice-versa, but it looks like it'd be valid for it to introspect whether the package owns both and do the replacement itself if so.

[Comment 2 Pacho Ramos 2022-05-26 16:44:28 UTC]

I also have hit this some times, I see also some ebuilds in the tree workarounding the problem by removing the directory at pkg_preinst phase :/

[Comment 3 Richard Gray 2025-01-15 17:33:06 UTC]

This also affects coreutils, which is probably more of a worry for everyone.

[Comment 4 Sam James 2025-01-15 17:33:44 UTC]

(In reply to Richard Gray from comment #3)
> This also affects coreutils, which is probably more of a worry for everyone.

I'm not sure how it does. We're not doing any replacements between symlinks and directories there.

[Comment 5 Richard Gray 2025-01-15 17:38:45 UTC]

I'm rather confused myself. I'll post more detail when I'm (more-or-less) up and running. I'm in the middle of a rebuild right now. Since everything seems to be converging on /usr/bin/ these days, I'll probably try removing the symlinks temporarily just to appease portage and have in intact installation tree.

[Comment 6 Sam James 2025-01-15 17:40:31 UTC]

I suggest filing a bug (or perhaps better, going on IRC to #gentoo) and showing full output. Sounds like possibly botched merge-usr conversion.