Symlinks and content downloader

[Fishaphrodite]

This is more for reference so people don't get tricked by this behavior, as I don't believe anyone would care much in general

If your /userdata/roms folder is a symlink to somewhere else, downloading something targeting inside the /userdata/roms folder will remove the link and put and empty directory instead (I assume it does this to ensure a realpath exists, without checking if any links satisfy the path itself). This can be verified by downloading blade buster for the NES from the content downloader for exemple.

This also occurs if only the system folder itself is a symlink (so a symlink /userdata/roms/nes will be replaced by an empty nes folder before extracting said package); I assume it recreates parents folder for the whole path if it doesn't find an actual folder along the way.

For information, this does Not remove any files, the links are the only ones getting removed, not their source. Also for those reading that are not aware, batocera itself doesn't use symlinks to handle where the /userdata folder points at, it mounts another folder, this issue doesn't happen unless you manually specifically symlink stuff.

[dmanlfc]

why is this here? should this not go in a wiki ?

[Fishaphrodite]

It's still a valid issue to have your share structure screwed up by the content downloader, even if it's a niche use case. Symlinks are a feature of the filesystem used by default in bato after all.

I guess it could be noted somewhere in the wiki as well in the meantime.

EDIT: if you'd rather have this being closed as "won't fix" or something, that's not a problem.

[uureel]

It's still a valid issue to have your share structure screwed up by the content downloader, even if it's a niche use case. Symlinks are a feature of the filesystem used by default in bato after all.

I guess it could be noted somewhere in the wiki as well in the meantime.

EDIT: if you'd rather have this being closed as "won't fix" or something, that's not a problem.

this isn't sane and shouldn't be happening; might possibly be attributed to busybox tar used in batocera, i recall seeing a few days ago someone mentioned on dc that bato's bb tar 'can't handle symlinks' - reading this now rings the bell. @dmanlfc

[n2qz]

The behavior is expected and normal for the pacman package manager used to install packages from the content downloader.

If your /userdata/roms folder is a symlink to somewhere else

Use sharedevice=DEVICES with a ROMS@ mount, instead of a symlink.

This also occurs if only the system folder itself is a symlink (so a symlink /userdata/roms/nes

Use a manual bind mount instead of a symbolic link, for mapping a roms folder to a different drive, for use with the content downloader.