symlinks broken in current Ubuntu

[qidydl]

homeshick link has stopped working in current Ubuntu versions. It creates symlinks with an incorrect path, e.g. in /home/david you get .file pointing to david/.homesick/repos/castle/file (so the user name is repeated incorrectly) instead of .homesick/repos/castle/file resulting in every link being broken.

Ubuntu has switched to using uutils instead of GNU coreutils, and it has a bug in dirname that causes dirname /home/david/. to return /home instead of /home/david. This impacts fs.sh line 174 where source_dir is computed using that pattern, and then everything goes off the rails.

This has theoretically already been fixed in uutils/coreutils#8911, but Ubuntu hasn't shipped the fix yet. I created an Ubuntu bug to hopefully get it fixed. I'm not sure if there's a quick or easy fix here in the meantime that might work around the problem. If nothing else, at least this is now a documented known issue.

[andsens]

If nothing else, at least this is now a documented known issue.

Already was 😁 Duplicate of #229
I guess I'll keep the issue open this time.

Feel free to post a link to a fork with a workaround. Though I won't be accepting it into the code base.

[qidydl]

Shoot, sorry I didn't find that, I think I was filtered to open issues. It's unfortunate that Ubuntu apparently might be one of the few distros left with the issue.

[andsens]

No problem. TBH I don't understand how that bug doesn't break half the OS. I also wonder what kind of bad stuff has been written to or deleted from peoples filesystems while it was installed.
And then there's the fix, which honestly kind of scares me: uutils/coreutils@df6ef34

I mean... why not just look at how coreutils implemented it and replicate that?
https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/c9f943b2e3f209af98253ce37f27573eee0cd6ff/src/dirname.c#L117-L131
https://github.com/coreutils/gnulib/blob/43d801a0234994cf97f5d7c34a5fb9b23b9be55a/lib/dirname-lgpl.c#L32-L54

[chrisguidry]

I had the same thought, @andsens! How on earth is this not shredding people's systems?!

I forked homeshick to try this fix out, it's okayish but obvs won't last forever: chrisguidry@1dee430

[qidydl]

There’s a way to revert to GNU coreutils which I can confirm fixes the problem, so you can close this and treat that as the solution.