Bug#2546: dpkg inappropriately marks packages as installed

[Ian Jackson <ian@chiark.chu.cam.ac.uk>]

Raul Miller writes ("Bug#2546: dpkg inappropriately marks packages as installed"):
...
> I've had other cases in the last couple days where re-installing the
> package fixed the problem

Hmm.

>  > I've checked my system and I can't find any unexectable scripts that
>  > aren't prerm/postrm scripts of packages I've not removed yet.  Are you
>  > sure that these scripts weren't installed using a version of dpkg
>  > prior to 0.93.50 ?  (I believe that's the first version which would
>  > set the permissions.)
>
> I'm positive that these are recent installations, with a version of
> dpkg more recent than 0.93.50.

This is very odd.  dpkg invokes maintainer scripts using `exec', which
would fail if the script weren't executable.  I'm sure you ought to
have seen some messages if it had actually tried to complete the
installation with (say) the postinst not executable.

> If it's not dpkg that's doing this, I suppose maybe it's a kernel bug
> of some sort...

You're not using umsdos or something, are you ?

Ian.