Possible bug when a commit replaces a symlink with a regular file

[mikenakis]

Why are you starting this discussion?

Bug

What GitHub Actions topic or product is this about?

Actions Runner

Discussion Details

This job:

https://github.com/mikenakis/MikeNakis.Kit/actions/runs/19614119433/job/56164234041

failed with the following nonsensical message:

/usr/share/dotnet/sdk/10.0.100/NuGet.Build.Tasks.Pack.targets(222,5): error : The path '/home/runner/work/MikeNakis.Kit/MikeNakis.Kit/LICENSE.md' is too long, or a component of the specified path is too long. [/home/runner/work/MikeNakis.Kit/MikeNakis.Kit/MikeNakis.Kit/MikeNakis.Kit.csproj]

The message is nonsensical because obviously, the path is not long at all.

Now, I know, this is an MSBuild error message, not a GitHub error message, but MSBuild does not normally issue this message, so my suspicion is that it is GitHub that did something fishy which caused MSBuild to get mighty confused.

If you look at the commit which introduced the problem:

"maintenance" mikenakis/MikeNakis.Kit@403b924

You will see that before this commit, LICENSE.md used to be a symlink pointing to MikeNakis.Kit.LICENSE.md, and the commit changed this, removing MikeNakis.Kit.LICENSE.md and changing LICENSE.md to be an actual text file instead of a symlink.

It is this kind of manipulation which, I suspect, GitHub (or maybe git?) does not handle correctly, causing things to go haywire.

To overcome this problem, I did two commits:

• One commit in which I renamed LICENSE.md to not-LICENSE.md, and whose action also failed, but only because the build was expecting to find a LICENSE.md which wasn't there ("trying to fix nonsensical "pathname too long" error": mikenakis/MikeNakis.Kit@4f7893f)

• And one more commit in which I renamed not-LICENSE.md back to LICENSE.md which succeeded. ("trying to fix nonsensical "pathname too long" error": mikenakis/MikeNakis.Kit@8d7685f)

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