(context)
In the "invisible application after upgrade" thread, Ed did not know how
I did my upgrade to f33. I responded that I mostly followed the Fedora
upgrade instructions from here:
"https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/dnf-system-upgrade/",
and listed the sequence of commands that I did. That included the steps
symlinks -r /usr | grep dangling
symlinks -r -d /usr
from the "Clean-Up Old Symlinks" section. Andras responded that
This isn't necessarily a good idea, because those dangling
symlinks
may belong to their respective packages. If so, removing them will
compromise the integrity of the package they belong to.
If Andras is correct, then
the upgrade instructions need to be changed.
Based on past experience, when a bug is submitted against Fedora
documentation, the Fedora documentation team will want suggestions on
how the document should be worded.
(question 1)
What should the instructions say? Is there a better yet easy and safe
way to find and clean out dangling symlinks? Maybe more detail should
accompany "After you verify the list of broken symlinks"?
(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?