1.7 setup.exe overwrites softlink for home

[Peter Wohlers]

>
> From:
> Corinna Vinschen
> Date:
> Tue, 6 Apr 2010 10:28:51 +0200
>
>
> On Apr  4 14:55, Peter Wohlers wrote:
>> Since upgrading to 1.7, I keep seeing weird problems with deletion
>> of my homedir symlink.
>>
>> Before running setup:
>> pwohlers@h1n1 ~
>> $ ll /
>> [...]
>> lrwxrwxrwx   1 Domain Users     18 2010-04-04 14:31 home ->
>> /cygdrive/d/Users/
>> [...]
>> After running setup:
>> [...]
>> Setup seems to have deleted the softlink for /home
>
> Well... yes.  That's probably a bit unfortunate.  The current mechanism
> always creates a couple of directories if they don't already exist:
>
>   /bin
>   /home
>   /etc
>   /lib
>   /tmp
>   /usr
>   /usr/bin
>   /usr/lib
>   /usr/src
>   /usr/local
>   /usr/local/bin
>   /usr/local/etc
>   /usr/local/lib
>   /usr/tmp
>   /var/log
>   /var/run
>   /var/tmp
>
> If the directory couldn't be created because a non-directory file uses
> the same name, it deletes that file and tries to create the directory
> again.  It's not perfect, but at least we know that the directories
> exist, afterwards.  We could add a mode which drops the aggressive
> creation strategy, but I only see that *could* make sense for home.
>
OK. Just curious as this seems to be a departure from previous versions' 
behaviors, so I wasn't sure if this was something new to 1.7, or merely 
pilot-error.

>> Is there something magical about the /home symlink that now needs to
>> be handled with fstab?  Or is it something else?
>
> Nothing "magic", it's just the current state of affairs.  Creating a
> /home mount point is certainly a good workaround, and it should even be
> a bit faster than a symlink.
>
>
Thanks for validation of workaround.

Gratefully,

Peter Wohlers


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