mass bug filing about packages manipulating conffiles (policy 10.7.3) (was: Re: mass bug filing about packages manipulating/deleting shipped files)
Hi,
here is my proposed bug template for reporting conffile manipulation.
That will cover the majority of these bugs. Non-conffile manipulation
may need some more analysis and discussion.
If noone objects, I'll go ahead with filing these bugs with Severity:
serious since this is a violation of a "must" directive.
Piuparts will find these problems in squeeze as well and in order to
have piuparts-analyze do its job (marking logs from failed tests as
bugged), I may have to mark them as found in the squeeze version, too. I
do not expect this qualifies for updating the packages in squeeze,
though. Therefore I'm asking the Release Team for permission to tag them
as squeeze-ignore immediately.
===== 8< =====
To: submit@bugs.debian.org
Subject: modifies conffiles (policy 10.7.3):
Package:
Version:
Severity: serious
User: debian-qa@lists.debian.org
Usertags: piuparts
Hi,
during a test with piuparts I noticed your package modifies conffiles.
This is forbidden by the policy, see
http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-files.html#s-config-files
10.7.3: "[...] The easy way to achieve this behavior is to make the
configuration file a conffile. [...] This implies that the default
version will be part of the package distribution, and must not be
modified by the maintainer scripts during installation (or at any
other time)."
Note that once a package ships a modified version of that conffile,
dpkg will prompt the user for an action how to handle the upgrade of
this modified conffile (that was not modified by the user).
Further in 10.7.3: "[...] must not ask unnecessary questions
(particularly during upgrades) [...]"
If a configuration file is customized by a maintainer script after
having asked some debconf questions, it may not be marked as a
conffile. Instead a template could be installed in /usr/share and used
by the postinst script to fill in the custom values and create (or
update) the configuration file (preserving any user modifications!).
This file must be removed during postrm purge.
ucf(1) may help with these tasks.
See also http://wiki.debian.org/DpkgConffileHandling
In https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2012/09/msg00412.html and
followups it has been agreed that these bugs are to be filed with
severity serious.
debsums reports modification of the following files:
cheers,
===== >8 =====
Andreas
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