(context)
[...]
(question 2)
In a later post, Andras provided and example of a dangling symlink (in
the "hunspell" package) that should not be deleted. When I was a C/C++
programmer (a long long time ago, in a galaxy far far away), dangling
pointers (and memory leaks) were naughty; they can cause serious
problems. Isn't a dangling symlink a file system parallel to a dangling
pointer in a C/C++ program? What good, valid purpose is there for a
package to have a dangling symlink? Or maybe "hunspell" needs a little
clean-up?
The appropriate person to deal with dangling symlinks in a package is the
maintainer. It doesn't make sense to include them in post-upgrade cleanup
as that is just hiding buglets. There are several bugzilla reports many with
duplicates.
because it was considered a question of packaging standards.
I gather that one proposal is to have rpmbuild refuse to package
dangling links, but fixing all the broken packages will take work
and the benefits are not large enough to justify the effort.