leapp upgrade stops with Inhibitor "Upgrade requires links in root directory to be relative"

Environment

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9
• Leapp

Issue

• The command leapp upgrade or leapp preupgrade reports an inhibitor:

   Risk Factor: high (inhibitor)
  Title: Upgrade requires links in root directory to be relative
  Summary: After rebooting, parts of the upgrade process can fail if symbolic links in / point to absolute paths.
  Please change these links to relative ones.
  Remediation: [command] sh -c ln -snf data /softlink
  Key: 3d895ad37ceaf4157864d439edb6bd75562061fa
  

NOTE: The remediation command suggested in leapp-report.txt is faulty and we are working to fix it through This content is not included.RHEL-30447 . The command is missing (") double quotes for subcommand of shell.

Resolution

1. Identify any softlinks pointing to a full path target in / . In the example below we have /softlink that points to /data

   # ls -l / | grep ^l
   lrwxrwxrwx.   1 root root    7 May 23  2022 bin -> usr/bin
   lrwxrwxrwx.   1 root root    7 May 23  2022 lib -> usr/lib
   lrwxrwxrwx.   1 root root    9 May 23  2022 lib64 -> usr/lib64
   lrwxrwxrwx.   1 root root    8 May 23  2022 sbin -> usr/sbin
   lrwxrwxrwx.   1 root root    5 Dec  8 13:08 softlink -> /data
   

2. Symlinks with absolute path such as softlink -> /data need to be corrected with a relative path.

   # sh -c "ln -snf data /softlink"                          <-- Rectified command, leapp report remediation is missing ("")
   # ll / | grep ^l
   lrwxrwxrwx.   1 root root    7 May 23  2022 bin -> usr/bin
   lrwxrwxrwx.   1 root root    7 May 23  2022 lib -> usr/lib
   lrwxrwxrwx.   1 root root    9 May 23  2022 lib64 -> usr/lib64
   lrwxrwxrwx.   1 root root    8 May 23  2022 sbin -> usr/sbin
   lrwxrwxrwx.   1 root root    4 Dec  8 13:10 softlink -> data
   

Root Cause

Leapp does not allow upgrades to continue if a softlink in / is pointing to a full path target since leapp operates from outside of a chroot environment, the softlink would have an incorrect target unless it is relative.

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