Re: dpkg no longer installs conffiles??
On Tue, 2016-11-29 at 19:18 +0100, Simon Richter wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 29.11.2016 17:58, Svante Signell wrote:
>
> > After upgrading to sid the conffiles don't seem to be installed any longer?
> > Examples are bash, passwd, basefiles and libpam-runtime. Especially the last
> > one cost me a day debugging to find out why logins crashed. What is causing
> > this, do I have some settings disabling conffiles? Or is this all due to the
> > merge of /usr? If so, how to revert that change until it is stable!
> The usual rule applies: if dpkg thinks the conffile has been
> deliberately deleted, it will not install a new version on top. The
> question is how that happened.
The probable cause was a hardware error om my SSD disk. Subsequent disk checking
wiped out several files, among them the important conffiles.
> It would be great if you could archive /var/lib/dpkg prior to repairing
> your system, so in case the dpkg maintainers want to look at it, they at
> least have half a chance of getting to the root of the problem.
I have saved it if somebody is interested. However, the save was after I could
start and log in to the computer again.
> To force reinstallation of configuration files, invoke dpkg with the
> "--force-confmiss" option when installing. This will only restore
> missing configuration files, but not overwrite changed ones. If some
> configuration files were damaged, you can use "--force-confnew" to
> unpack all configuration files; your old files can be found with a
> ".dpkg-old" suffix then.
A problem with essential and important packages is that you can only reinstall
them. So apt-get install --reinstall or dpkg -i <path_to_deb> only reinstalls
the package, not the conffiles. Now I know how to get the conffiles back, but
tracing which packages has them is hard: Any ideas?
Anyway, I think the default behaviour of dpkg is wrong: If you have
intentionally or by accident removed some conffiles, they should be installed by
default with a reinstall. I'll file a serious bug on dpkg for it.
Thanks!
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