GNU bug report logs - #23723
patch-shebang phase breaks symlinks

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From: Jelle Licht <jlicht <at> fsfe.org>
To: 23723 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#23723: patch-shebang phase breaks symlinks
Date: Wed, 08 Jun 2016 01:42:31 +0200

Hi Guix,

It seems that the patch-shebang functionality does not deal gracefully
with symlinks: it just overwrites them!

After struggling somewhat with getting the recently packaged node 6.0.0
to behave, I found out that `patch-shebang' in (guix build
gnu-build-system) does not work properly on symlinks.

To illustrate, in this specific case, there was an executable
script included with the node tarball, namely
`lib/node-modules/npm/bin/npm-cli.js' with an env-based shebang:
`/usr/bin/env node'.

As the `node' executable will only be available after the `install'
phase of the build system, it is not patched before hand. During the
`install' phase, a symlink is created from `bin/npm' to
`lib/node-modules/npm/bin/npm-cli.js' (in the store output directory
this time, of course). Then the `patch-shebangs' phase finds this
symlink and proceeds to patch it. Instead of transparently following the
symlink and patching the `npm-cli.js' script, the `npm' symlink is
overwritten with a shebang-patched copy of `npm-cli.js'.

For node, this is a problem because of how node loads run-time
dependencies; load paths are resolved relative to the actual file, not
the symlink.

- Jelle

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