File name conflicts with other similar packages?

[Florian Festi]

Ignacio Valdes wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I have created an rpm called Astronaut on sourceforge.net that comes
> in several flavors: Nostromo, WorldVistA and more in the future. They
> should install without difficulty side-by-side. However, while some of
> the files that the rpm installs have the same name, they do not get
> installed in the same directories.  rpm -i is warning me that they
> have duplicate filenames which they do but they do not get installed
> to the same locations. I have to use --force to make it install
> anyway.  I do want to have entirely separate instances with the same
> filenames which is what it does now but gives the warning. How do I
> avoid this problem without --force?

If this really is the case this is a bug and you should report the details 
(especially the rpm version). But it is also possible that these file 
conflict because the directories (or some parent directories) are symlinks 
that lead to the same location. As there are a lot of LICENSE and README 
files in /usr/share/doc/*/ it is hard to believe that just having the same 
basenames leads to problems.

Earlier versions of rpm did not catch these cases for symlinks that are just 
going to be installed but this has been fixed in 4.7.

Florian