Re: Interaction between dpkg's directory removal and dpkg-maintscript-helper

[Mike Hommey <mh@glandium.org>]

On Fri, May 06, 2016 at 02:16:32AM +0200, Iustin Pop wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm not sure if this is a bug or if I'm doing something wrong, looking
> for advice. If one wants to deprecate a conffile locate in an otherwise
> empty directory (let's say /etc/foo/bar), the following happens at new
> package install time:
> 
> - before files unpacking, new-preinst is called; from
>   dpkg-maintscript-helper manual, at this stage the conffile is renamed
>   to bar.dpkg-remove (assuming not changed by user)
> - new package files are unpacked; at this point, the new package doesn't
>   own the conffile anymore, so dpkg doesn't have any tracked file under
>   /etc/foo, so it tries to remove the directory; however this fails due
>   to the /etc/foo/bar.dpkg-remove
> - the new package is configured, and the postinst call to
>   dpkg-maintscript-helper now remove /etc/foo/bar.dpkg-remove, but
>   leaves /etc/foo as an unowned, dangling directory
> 
> At least, this is my understanding from reading policy and from piuparts
> output. I can workaround it by manually removing the directory (if
> empty), but seems somewhat out-of-place. Thoughts?

See also: bug 815969.

Mike