Debian Bug report logs - #421346
debhelper: should automatically mark symlinks in /etc as conffiles

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Message #5 received at submit@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Marc Haber <mh+debian-bugs@zugschlus.de>

To: Debian Bug Tracking System <submit@bugs.debian.org>

Subject: debhelper: should automatically mark symlinks in /etc as conffiles

Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2007 09:13:24 +0200

Package: debhelper
Version: 5.0.49
Severity: normal

Hi,

having a non-conffile symlink in /etc is causing data loss if the
symlink name was already present in the file system (#420578). It is
easy to forget marking symlinks explicitly as conffiles in the package
since debhelper does this automatically for plain files placed into
/etc.

Please consider having debhelper do this for symlinks as well.

Greetings
Marc

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.21-zgsrv (SMP w/1 CPU core; PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages debhelper depends on:
ii  binutils               2.17cvs20070426-1 The GNU assembler, linker and bina
ii  coreutils              5.97-5.3          The GNU core utilities
ii  dpkg-dev               1.13.25           package building tools for Debian
ii  file                   4.20-5            Determines file type using "magic"
ii  html2text              1.3.2a-3          An advanced HTML to text converter
ii  perl                   5.8.8-7           Larry Wall's Practical Extraction 
ii  po-debconf             1.0.8             manage translated Debconf template

debhelper recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information

Message #10 received at 421346@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>

To: Marc Haber <mh+debian-bugs@zugschlus.de>, 421346@bugs.debian.org

Subject: Re: Bug#421346: debhelper: should automatically mark symlinks in /etc as conffiles

Date: Mon, 14 May 2007 15:07:27 -0400

[Message part 1 (text/plain, inline)]

Marc Haber wrote:
> having a non-conffile symlink in /etc is causing data loss if the
> symlink name was already present in the file system (#420578). It is
> easy to forget marking symlinks explicitly as conffiles in the package
> since debhelper does this automatically for plain files placed into
> /etc.
> 
> Please consider having debhelper do this for symlinks as well.

Isn't this known to create packages that dpkg will not install at all?
(#421344). Until I see some evidence that dpkg does the right thing for
conffiles that are symlinks, debhelper can't do that.

AFAIK, dpkg has never intended symlinks to be conffiles, the UI for
diffing conffiles also won't work, etc.

-- 
see shy jo

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