[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#390328: initscripts: does not install if /var is a relative symlink

[Marc Haber]

Package: initscripts
Version: 2.86.ds1-28
Severity: important

For historical reasons, I mount file systems on /mnt/foo only. Having
var as a separate partition, /var is a relative symlink to mnt/var/var
on my systems. The link is relative to ensure that it points to the
right place even from the host system's view of a chroot, vserver file
system or a backup.

When initscripts installs, it does a bind-mount of / to /.root and
tries to create /var/run and /var/lock in the bind-mounted place. This
fails on my systems since the relative symlink expands to
/.root/mnt/var/var, which is a dangling symlink since the file system
does not seem to be mounted inside the bind-mount.

Please try honoring this special case. I can test preliminary versions
of your code if you want me to, and I will try to be present on
#pkg-sysvinit on oftc until this has been fixed.

Greetings
Marc

-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.17.13-zgsrv
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=de_DE (charmap=ISO-8859-1)

Versions of packages initscripts depends on:
ii  debianutils                  2.17.2      Miscellaneous utilities specific t
ii  e2fsprogs                    1.39-1      ext2 file system utilities and lib
ii  libc6                        2.3.6.ds1-4 GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  lsb-base                     3.1-17      Linux Standard Base 3.1 init scrip
ii  mount                        2.12r-11    Tools for mounting and manipulatin
ii  sysvinit-utils               2.86.ds1-28 System-V-like utilities

Versions of packages initscripts recommends:
ii  psmisc                        22.3-1     Utilities that use the proc filesy

-- no debconf information