Re: [Help] How to fix a buggy prerm script in sarge?

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org> wrote:

> On Sun, Nov 13, 2005 at 12:25:01PM +0100, Frank Küster <frank@debian.org> was heard to say:
>> we just received a bug report that is caused by a buggy prerm script
>> in the package in sarge (it fails because it doesn't handle read-only
>> /usr/local properly).  Is there any way to fix this, except documenting
>> it in the release notes?
>
>   If your old prerm fails, the new prerm should be called with
> "failed-upgrade" as its first argument (see Policy 6.4 and 6.5),
> so you can do any necessary workarounds there.  Errors in postrm
> are handled similarly.

But what would be the "necessary workarounds"?  The offending lines are:

  LOCALTEXMF=/usr/local/share/texmf
  rm -f $LOCALTEXMF/ls-R
  rmdir $LOCALTEXMF 2>/dev/null || true

Since we cannot make /usr/local writable in the new prerm if it is
mounted read-only, the only means I currently see would be to edit the
old version's prerm script.  Which has been said would get a no from the
release team;  I'll have to verify that of nobody comes up with an
alternative. 

And I think lintian/linda should check for lines involving /usr/local
that do no error checking.

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer