Re: idea: unclear purge cleanup package
On Thu, Dec 26, 2002 at 10:09:23PM -0500, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> On a related note, I suspect there are a lot of broken postrm scripts
> still lying in wait on Debian systems, where old (and/or buggy)
> packages have been removed but not purged, and their postrm will
> interact in bad ways with the currently installed packages. This is
> especially tricky when postrms remove config files, drop databases,
> and other potentially destructive things.
I ran into this when I took over man-db and noticed that its old postrm
scripts nuked /var/cache/man, which is wrong. I looked back through as
many versions of its postrm as I could find and observed that none of
them did anything else meaningful, so I just had the new preinst remove
the old postrm with an appropriate version check.
I still shudder whenever I look at this code, but I don't see any
alternative and nobody has reported any problems with it in the last
year and a half, so ...
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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