Bug 834600

Summary:	Ignore collisions if target symlink owned by same package
Product:	Portage Development	Reporter:	Sam James <sam>
Component:	Core	Assignee:	Portage team <dev-portage>
Status:	CONFIRMED ---
Severity:	normal	CC:	flow, gentoo, hlein, hydrapolic, pacho, richard, zx2c4
Priority:	Normal
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
See Also:	https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=664940 https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=861785 https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=916036
Whiteboard:
Package list:		Runtime testing required:	---
Bug Depends on:
Bug Blocks:	564428, 815118, 834503, 957712

Description Sam James archtester

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 archtester

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 gentoo-dev

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 archtester

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 archtester

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.