From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20021003 Description of problem: rpm -Uvh creates also broken symlinks when the package suggests so. No warning or notice is given to the user. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): rpm-4.0.4 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Obtain a rpm that creates broken symlinks. (e.g. nmap-frontend-3.00-1.i386.rpm from download.insecure.org/nmap/dist/nmap-frontend-3.00-1.i386.rpm) 2. rpm -Uvh nmap-frontend-3.00-1.i386.rpm Actual Results: The following files are created: /usr/bin/nmapfe /usr/bin/xnmap -> /usr/bin/nmapfe /bin/xnmap -> /bin/nmapfe The last one is a broken link. Expected Results: rpm should check for creating broken links. At minimum a warning 'created a link to non-existing file' should be given, or preferably 'trying to create link to non-existing file. Proceed?' Additional info: The problem has also been reported to the maintainer of the nmap-frontend package.
This is a package, not rpm, problem. The problem is more complicated than stat'ing the target, as there are implicit ordering constraints (and painful loops) on installed packages that would be needed as well (read: 2nd package may install target that 1st package symlinks too).