Re: Prevent surprising build failures involving symlinks

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

Jonathan Perkin <jperkin%joyent.com@localhost> writes:

> * On 2019-05-01 at 11:40 BST, Roland Illig wrote:
>
>> I've started a bulk build, and several packages failed surprisingly.
>> They didn't find their dependent libraries or include files, and some
>> other just didn't install any files. It took me quite a while to track
>> down the actual cause.
>> 
>> My actual setup is:
>> 
>>     /home/pbulk -> /scratch/pbulk
>> 
>>     sh /home/pbulk/pkgsrc/bootstrap/bootstrap --unprivileged
>> 
>> To prevent others from experiencing the same problem, I'd like to apply
>> the attached patch to the bootstrap. Any thoughts? Am I really the first
>> one to experience this?
>
> There's no point having ALLOW_SYMLINK_PATHS, it simply won't work at
> all, and providing even the faintest hope that it might is harmful.
>
> I approve having a simple check or die in bootstrap though.

The check for no symlinks sounds good to me.


However, there is another case, where one has put pkgsrc someplace,
bootstrapped without symlinks, and then has e.g. a /usr/pgksrc symlink
to it.

Or, consider pkgsrc in /usr/home/pkgsrc, but then you do
  cd /home/pkgsrc/foo/bar
  make package

I have seen various things fail, typically involving gir-scanner (or
something similar).

So, I wonder if there should be a check for symlinks at package build
time as well.