Package: dpkg Version: 1.18.4 Severity: normal Hi,
this is a followup to the discussion I had with Guillem in some bug reports in early 2016 and in private mail, the latter unfortunately never answered. I think that the path-include option is handling symlinks differently from normal files, which is confusing for the end-user. If this is intentional, it needs to be documented much more verbosely. Way to reproduce: - use debootstrap to set up a sid chroot with variant minbase - copy tzdata*.deb from unstable (today: 2016c-1) to the chroot - chroot inside the chroot - purge tzdata After this process, /usr/share/zoneinfo does not exist. Then try: dpkg --install \ --path-exclude=/usr/share/zoneinfo/* \ --path-exclude=/usr/share/zoneinfo/*/* \ tzdata*.deb /usr/share/zoneinfo now exists and is empty. This shows that the path-exclude has actually worked. purge tzdata again, verify that /usr/share/zoneinfo does not exist. Then try: dpkg --install \ --path-exclude=/usr/share/zoneinfo/* \ --path-exclude=/usr/share/zoneinfo/*/* \ --path-include=/usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe \ tzdata*.deb And see that /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe has been populated with symlinks _only_. dpkg --install \ --path-exclude=/usr/share/zoneinfo/* \ --path-exclude=/usr/share/zoneinfo/*/* \ --path-include=/usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe \ --path-include=/usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Paris \ tzdata*.deb adds the Europe/Paris _file_ to all the symlinks. I would either expect: (a) --path-include=/usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe including _all_ contents, regular files -and- symlinks to the filesystem or (b) --path-include=/usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe adding _only_ the empty directory to the filesystem. It also does not seem possible to not having the symlinks, but the directory. Adding --path-exclude=/usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Zurich does not prevent the symlink from being installed. As long as the directory is included, the symlinks are unconditionally included as well. Greetings Marc -- System Information: Debian Release: stretch/sid APT prefers unstable APT policy: (500, 'unstable') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Kernel: Linux 4.4.6-zgws1 (SMP w/6 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) Versions of packages dpkg depends on: ii libbz2-1.0 1.0.6-8 ii libc6 2.22-3 ii liblzma5 5.1.1alpha+20120614-2.1 ii libselinux1 2.4-3+b1 ii tar 1.28-2.1 ii zlib1g 1:1.2.8.dfsg-2+b1 dpkg recommends no packages. Versions of packages dpkg suggests: ii apt 1.2.7 -- no debconf information
