Re: Bug#201023: dosemu: purging doesmu wipes out all user data under /var/lib/dosemu)

[Steve Greenland <steveg@moregruel.net>]

On 15-Jul-03, 06:54 (CDT), Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au> wrote: 
> Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> wrote:
> > And all configuration files, but not all user data. When you purge emacs,
> > you don't also remove all the text files that you've written with emacs,
> 
> Sure, but then you don't put them in /var/lib/emacs do you?

I think part of the problem, in this particular case, is that dosemu
doesn't provide and easy way to put disk images anywhere else. I may
not be remembering correctly, but I'm pretty sure I tried to reference
files under my home directory directly, and was unable to make it work;
they needed to be relative to DOSEMU_LIB_DIR. Maybe this has been fixed
since I last tried it, but I don't see anything recent in the Changelog
regarding it. It is sorely tempting for the new user to put stuff
directly into /var/lib/dosemu (once, of course, that she figures out
what the value of DOSEMU_LIB_DIR *is*, of course).

In the legal liability world, they call this sort of thing an
"attractive nuisance".

Now, of course it works to put a softlink to the real file, and then the
rm -rf won't follow it, and everything is hunky-dory. This may even be
documented somewhere in the outdated, incoherent mess that is the dosemu
documentation (which is upstreams fault).


> dosemu is not the only package which removes /var/lib/<package-name>
> when it is purged.

But dosemu doesn't put anything into /var/lib/dosemu, does it? The only
data that is there comes from the user, right? If so, then if it's
non-empty on purge, there's no real excuse for deleting it.

In fact, if it's user data only, there's no real excuse for it being
under /var at all, Except that we don't really have a better place
(absent /srv), and dosemu's overly sensitive configuration.

Steve
-- 
Steve Greenland
    The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating
    system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the
    world.       -- seen on the net