Re: Problems with xedit, xcalc, xfontsel, emacs

[Igor Pechtchanski <pechtcha at cs dot nyu dot edu>]

On Tue, 12 Nov 2002, Frank-Michael Moser wrote:

> > It seems that a simlink is broken.
>
> ... but I wonder what is the reason for that.
>
> I had the same problem on my machine. After a lot of debugging I gave up
> for the first time. Then I installed Cygwin with XFree on a friend's box
> and - voila - xedit&co worked fine.
>
> So I decided to reinstall my Cygwin. First I renamed the old Cygwin
> folder and removed all entries from the registry. Then I installed
> everything what I had in my old local package directory from
> ftp://mirrors.rcn.net. But ;( the same problem again.
>
> The only difference (checking cygcheck) to my friend's box was that on
> his box I only installed a subset of my packages. Now I guess that this
> must be a problem which is related to the order of installing certain
> X-packages. There must be a package which creates app-defaults as a
> regular folder before any symbolic link is created such that instead of
>
>    moser@PIP /tmp/test
>    $ ls -l
>    drwxr-xr-x    2 moser    Kein   0 Nov 12 18:51 a/
>    total 0
>
>    moser@PIP /tmp/test
>    $ ln -s a b
>
>    moser@PIP /tmp/test
>    $ ls -l
>    total 0
>    drwxr-xr-x    2 moser    Kein            0 Nov 12 18:51 a/
>    lrwxrwxrwx    1 moser    Kein           82 Nov 12 18:51 b -> a/
>
> later it looks like this:
>
>    moser@PIP /tmp/test
>    $ ls -l
>    total 0
>    drwxr-xr-x    2 moser    Kein            0 Nov 12 18:51 a/
>    drwxr-xr-x    2 moser    Kein            0 Nov 12 18:53 b/
>
>    moser@PIP /tmp/test
>    $ ln -s a b
>
>    moser@PIP /tmp/test
>    $ ls -l
>    total 0
>    drwxr-xr-x    2 moser    Kein            0 Nov 12 18:51 a/
>    drwxr-xr-x    2 moser    Kein            0 Nov 12 18:54 b/
>
>    moser@PIP /tmp/test
>    $ ls -l b
>    total 0
>    lrwxrwxrwx    1 moser    Kein           82 Nov 12 18:54 a -> a
>
> I guess the package which installs app-defaults/Mwm must be culprit.
>
> Frank-Michael

Frank-Michael,
Actions of this sort (creating symbolic links, directories, etc) are
usually performed in postinstall scripts.  The postinstall scripts remain
after they are executed, but are renamed to <scriptname>.done.  They are
located in /etc/postinstall.  If you suspect a particular package, you
should be able to browse through its postinstall script.  If there is
indeed a bug (as you seem to indicate), I'm sure the maintainer of the
package would appreciate a patch (or at least a note on how to fix
things).
	Igor
-- 
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