Arch Linux

Schark

Member

Registered: 2024-07-21

Posts: 1

/opt exists in filesystem

I recently installed new Arch distro by hand and I decided to have /home and /opt on a different partition /dev/sdd4. I explicitly decided to not have /home and /opt individually mounted into the partition but keep them in a direcotry named /userdata which is mounted on sdd4. This is to have A: a better overview and B: be safe for future root directories which need to be in / but I may don't want them to be in the root partition.

For that I moved the direcotires /home and /opt into /userdata and created a symlink for both directories in the root direcotry.

commands:

sudo mv /home /userdata/

sudo mv /opt /userdata/

sudo ln -s /userdata/home /home

sudo ln -s /userdata/opt /opt

My main problem is for /home everything works fine for now. But if I wan't to install a package which installs its data into /opt e.g. discord. This ended up in an error message which says.

error: failed to commit transaction (conflicting files)
discord: /opt exists in filesystem

I don't want to use --override even this may work it woudn't be correct even for future packages.

If I try to install vivaldi everything seem to work properly in the first place but vivaldi overrides the symlink and creates a real directory in place. If i move /opt/vivaldi by hand and recreate the symlink I sometimes experience random crashes of vivaldi pages or even the whole application.

Both the root and userdata partition uses btrfs.

I think this may be a permission issue but I'm unsure. Is there anything special where I need to pay attention to?

Trilby

Inspector Parrot

Registered: 2011-11-29

Posts: 30,456

Website

Re: /opt exists in filesystem

This whole approach does not seem wise to me, but I'm pretty sure bind mounts would be much less of an issue than symlinks.

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"UNIX is simple and coherent" - Dennis Ritchie; "GNU's Not Unix" - Richard Stallman

Scimmia

Fellow

Registered: 2012-09-01

Posts: 13,726

Re: /opt exists in filesystem

You cannot replace dirs managed by pacman with symlinks. Look into bind mounts.