Problem with lprng turned out to be problem with dpkg?

[Rob Browning <osiris@cs.utexas.edu>]

I'd like to suggest that dpkg be fixed so that it always updates the
permissions of the files and (leaf) directories in the file system to
match those in the deb file.  Right now it doesn't.

This came up again because I had a problem with lprng where attempts
to print after reboot would fail.  Tony Finch (on debian-user)
discovered the problem (I think).  It was that /var/spool/lpd and
/var/spool/lpd/lp were root.root, not lp.lp as the .deb file
indicates.

I think this is another manifestation of what I consider a bug in
dpkg.  I mentioned this once before when an initial release of
base-files had bad directory permissions.  The problem is that if a
directory already exists on your file system, even its permissions are
different from what's in the tarfile (deb file), installing the
package will *not* update the permissions.

This seems to be clearly wrong, but no one has really complained yet,
even thought it's had the potential to cause a problems that are hard
to track down.

The only way I know of to handle this now is to get the permissions
right in the initial package release, or if mistakes are made, add
commands to the package's postinst to correct the permissions.

I don't know if the same problem occurs with files in the tarfile.

Thanks
-- 
Rob