Bug#750158: general: cp -a does not respect file attributes

["Tobias Frost" <tobi@frost.de>]

Control: reassign -1 coreutils
Control: severity -1 important

Hallo Ecky,

/bin/cp is in the package coreutils, so reporting against "general" is wrong
here. Reassigning accordingly.  As this is not a policy violation, "serious"
is also not appropiate [1], changing therefore to important

-- 
tobi

[1] https://www.debian.org/Bugs/Developer#severities

> Package: general
> Severity: serious
> Justification: ?.?.?
>
> Dear Maintainer,
>
>    * What led up to the situation?
> I installed a new bigger drive (array of 4 disks in raid5) and installed
> Debian
> 7.5 on this new drive. Then I wanted to copy files from the old drives that
> had
> been running under Debian 6.0 to the new drive without compromizing new
> configuration files that may be around in the new home directories.
>
>    * What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or ineffective)?
> Therefore, as root, I issued the command "cp -anr <source-homedir> <target-
> homedir>"
>
>    * What was the outcome of this action?
> All files were copied but the file attributes of the source-files were not
> kept, all copied files belong now to root and permission-flags were reset to
> the defaults of the root user.
>
>    * What outcome did you expect instead?
> I exspected that file attributes of the source-files are kept, notably
> user,group and permission-flags as describet in the man-page for cp option -a.
>
> *** End of the template - remove these lines ***
>
>
>
> -- System Information:
> Debian Release: 7.5
>   APT prefers stable-updates
>   APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable')
> Architecture: i386 (i686)
>
> Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-4-686-pae (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
> Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
> Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
>
>