Arch Linux

Wow, what a helpful bug report. What is the filesystem? What are the directory permissions? You have to give us a lot more than this to work from if you aren't going to do some debugging or advance scouting yourself...

I'm guessing the filesystem is FAT or FAT32 or something that doesn't natively support symlinks.

Can you try the following and attach the output?

cd /path/to/your/directory
touch test-file
ln -s test-file test-symlink
ln test-file test-hardlink
ls -l test-*

vboxsf

and indeed there is no symlinking in this filesystem

sorry for the not very informative bug report, i was just lazy to search

thx for the very constructive 1st comment

I'd rather not close this thus the reason for those last questions. If hardlinking is a viable option we could at least consider trying that after a failure to symlink. With pacman 3.5.0 and later your repository will not work at all if that link we are attempting to create does not exist.

more info:

vboxsf, used for getting the data out of the VirtualBox, when this really is getting a problem, in no time sshfs or something can be used

$ ln -s herecura-stable-any.txt herecura-bla
ln: creating symbolic link `herecura-bla': Operation not permitted

$ ln herecura-stable-any.txt herecura-bla
ln: creating hard link `herecura-bla' => `herecura-stable-any.txt': Operation not permitted


so maybe if the links become required, a big notification could be given someone has to use a filesystem capable of symlinking or at minimal hardlinking
or you could for some filesystems like vboxsf, fat32, ... fall further back to a copy of the file in stead of a link ?

For reference: http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/818

http://projects.archlinux.org/pacman.git/commit/?h=maint&id=21d5dedf