Re: testing whether package is removed or purged with -x, not -f

["Christopher W. Curtis" <ccurtis@aet-usa.com>]

Josip Rodin wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Jul 04, 2000 at 07:24:30PM -0400, Christopher W. Curtis wrote:
> >
> > This cannot be proven - I didn't want it to run, so I chmod -x it.  It
> > seemed like a logical thing to do.  I didn't want to delete it because I
> > may have wanted it again later, and I didn't want to rename it because
> > it would leave cruft in /sbin.
> 
> This would usually be handled by splitting out portmap daemon and its init.d
> script into its own package... but I doubt that it is wise to do that.

There's really no reason why it wouldn't be wise.  netbase is a required
package, but I don't want it running on my firewall.  The only (big)
things that require it are nfs and nis; services which aren't really
that common [reasoning: debian is not a 'corporate' dist; most people
who use nis and nfs are organizations and the majority still have that
'who do i call?' attitude that makes them pick a dist with phone
support.  I would like to think the the rest of the debian users are
security concious (though recent events may lead me to believe
otherwise) and would certainly not expose themselves by running nis if
they didn't need to.  nis and nfs generally go hand-in-hand, and places
that allow you to nfs mount public drives are typically going to be
accessed via either ftp or http].

Now, I'm sure a lot of people are going to have issues with everything I
just said, but the short of it, for me, is:  I want a firewall.  netbase
is required, as I need things like ifconfig, which it provides. 
portmap, which it also defaults to on, is detrmental.

Now, yes, I can run update-rc.d to "fix" this, but in my mind it is no
different than including inn with an irc client and being told I can
change the init script to fix it.

> > I asked only that it check -x, and not -f, thereby printing no error
> > whatsoever.  The error printed is not the script saying something is wrong
> > - it is bash saying the script is trying to do something wrong.
> 
> So file a (severity wishlist) bug against the package containing the script,
> there's little point in mailing -devel about it.

I didn't realize that mailing -devel would be of little use.  I didn't
want to file a dozen little bug reports.  I just wanted to send a short
message to all developers, saying, hey, test -x makes more sense than
test -f, then hope that developers would agree, and make that change the
next time the package needs to be updated.

Christopher