Created attachment 348797 [details] patch for mc.spec to covert COPYING symlink into regular file Description of problem: The COPYING file of the mc package is only a symlink to /usr/share/automake-1.10/COPYING. This lead to problems if e.g. the automake package is update after a mc build, since the target of the symlink will be not available anymore. This happened e.g. just now in F10: mc-4.6.2-8.fc10.i386 automake-1.11-2.fc10.noarch ls -la /usr/share/doc/mc-4.6.2/COPYING lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 32 2009-06-03 19:03 /usr/share/doc/mc-4.6.2/COPYING -> /usr/share/automake-1.10/COPYING Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): - the problem is in all releases of mc in Fedora (F10, F11, rawhide) Additional info: Most likely it would be better that the package would contain a real file for the license information and not only a symbolic link. Since it looks like that it is upstream's intention to always use the most recent COPYING from the installed automake (./autogen.sh updates the COPYING symlink), I suggest that the symlink is just coverted to a regular file containing the target's content at compile time. I've attached a patch for mc.spec.
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The problem is still in F12 and F11. It's now nearly half a year after I've reported the bug. :-( I've already attached a patch and the problem can be solved without any risk to the package itself. It would be great if the integrity of the license file could be restored in both stable versions of Fedora, too. ;-) Thanks!
Christian, it seems that upstream is going to release an official release of the new mc quite soon. The problem will be resolved once forever as soon as mc-4.7.0 is officially released. And I will be happy to release updates ASAP then :)
Actually, bug solved. Now file ${srcdir}/COPYING it's a symlink to ${srcdir}/doc/COPYING regular file.