Re: design issues in debian packages
On Wed, Dec 19, 2001 at 10:47:44AM +1100, Brian May wrote:
> 1) packages that create a new userid and send mail to that userid without
> the administrator realizing. One great offender I just noticed recently
> (and still have to fix) is cricket.
Since 1.0.3-3 (Nov 19), cricket ships with a MAILTO line in its cron.d
fragment which directs mail to root by default. Before 1.0.3-1 (Nov 5), it
would not send mail at all, and only send error output to the logfile. So
this was really only a problem for two weeks, and I wouldn't consider it a
"great offender".
> Suggestion: Any package that sends email to a private user should add an
> entry to /etc/aliases for that user, so that the administrator can keep
> track of where E-Mail maybe coming from, with no surprises.
When this came up for Cricket, I decided that there were too many potential
problems and unwanted side effects when adding an entry to the aliases file.
Instead, I used cron's MAILTO feature, which puts the setting in an existing
conffile where it is easily tailored by the user.
> Even better: I have going to try and work out how to disable these E-Mails
> from cricket - I don't wont them, as everything is logged anyway.
In /etc/cron.d/cricket, add "> /dev/null 2>&1" to the end of the command
line.
> When you remove a package (as distinct from purging it) I expect that
> the package is not going to have any more effect, just some useless
> config files will be kept around that are no longer useful because the
> binaries have been removed. Wrong! These config files, I think tell a
> different story:
>
> snoopy:unstable:~# dpkg -L syslog-common
> /var/lib/syslog-common
What kind of conffile is /var/lib/syslog-common?
> /etc/logrotate.d/syslog-common
> /etc/devfs/devices.d/syslog-common
For log rotation, perhaps it should be made possible to add a check (via a
prerotate script fragment or some such) so that nothing is done if the
package is not installed, similar to how things work with crontab fragments
now.
--
- mdz
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