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Re: idea: unclear purge cleanup package



On Thu, Dec 26, 2002 at 10:09:23PM -0500, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> On a related note, I suspect there are a lot of broken postrm scripts
> still lying in wait on Debian systems, where old (and/or buggy)
> packages have been removed but not purged, and their postrm will
> interact in bad ways with the currently installed packages.  This is
> especially tricky when postrms remove config files, drop databases,
> and other potentially destructive things.

It occurs that if we're going to deal with this then we *really* should
figure out a way to deal with the spectre of broken prerm scripts at the
same time. As policy 6.5 makes clear, there is currently no way for us
to deal with, say, a prerm that accidentally contains some badly written
shell variable expansion that winds up doing 'rm -rf /': the old prerm
is the first thing run in any upgrade.

I think a package that cleans up broken postrms should be ready to clean
up broken prerms as well.

-- 
Colin Watson                                  [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]



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