mass bug filing about packages with empty /usr/share/doc/$package/ (no copyright file)?

[Andreas Beckmann <debian@abeckmann.de>]

Hi,

someone asked me to add a piuparts check for packages that don't have a
copyright file /usr/share/doc/$package/copyright. I added something
(it's now in the git repository and running on piuparts.d.o) and filed a
few bugs already, but now it seems the problem is more widespread. The
problem usually occurs after an upgrade (e.g. squeeze->wheezy) where the
package does change something w.r.t directories and symlinks in
/usr/share/doc.
As dpkg intentionally does not replace a directory with a symlink (or
vice versa), these package usually end up with an empty /u/s/d/$package/
directory instead of a symlink like
/u/s/d/$package -> $package-common , so maintainer scripts are needed to
do the conversion.

The list of buggy packages can be found here:
http://piuparts.debian.org/squeeze2wheezy/unknown_failures.html
(There are some logs with different "unclassified" problems, but most of
them have this problem.)

I'm afraid I don't have the time right now to thoroughly analyze these
logs and report all the bugs, so some help would be welcome.
Right now there are about 30 packages being buggy, but more will
probably show up as squeeze2wheezy gets retested with the new check.

Also we should formulate some advice how to fix this issue, probably
including some maintainer script snippets. There are several DDs that
have already fixed these bugs (thanks!), so they should know how to do
this :-)

As missing a copyright file is a violation of policy 12.5, these would
be RC bugs affecting wheezy.

The error output at the end of the logfile looks like this:

  MISSING COPYRIGHT FILE: /usr/share/doc/bitlbee/copyright
  drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Sep 15 12:45 /usr/share/doc/bitlbee
  total 8
  drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 4096 Sep 15 12:45 .
  drwxr-xr-x 92 root root 4096 Sep 15 12:45 ..

and was generated with

  echo MISSING COPYRIGHT FILE: $PKGDOCDIR/copyright
  ls -lad $PKGDOCDIR
  ls -la $PKGDOCDIR/


A bug template should probably start with:

<------------- snip ------------------>
To: submit@bugs.debian.org
Subject: $PACKAGE: copyright file missing after upgrade (policy 12.5)

Package: $PACKAGE
Version: $VERSION
Severity: serious
User: debian-qa@lists.debian.org
Usertags: piuparts
Control: found -1 $PACKAGE/$VERSION

Hi,

during a test with piuparts I noticed your package misses the copyright
file after an upgrade from squeeze to wheezy, which is a violation of
Policy 12.5:
http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-docs.html#s-copyrightfile

After the upgrade /usr/share/doc/$PACKAGE/ is just an empty directory.

...


Cheers,
<------------- snap ------------------>


Cheers,

Andreas