interesting question

[Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>]

Here's an interesting hypothetical question we came up with at the
office:

Suppose a .deb is released that does rm -rf / in its prerm. We know it
has been installed on a bunch of machines all over the place. How can we
safely upgrade them?

I don't see any way to do it, because
/usr/doc/packaging-manual/packaging.html/ch-maintainerscripts.html
says that "old-prerm upgrade new-version" is the absolute first command
to be run during a package upgrade.

By contrast, if the rm -rf is in the old-postrm, the preinst of the new
package can whipe it out or something.

Note that in RPM, the preinst _and_ postinst are run before the
old-prerm and old-postrm. I emphasize that is _way_ broken, but it does
let this hypothetical situation be dealt with.


Hm. Would making a new, independant package that shiped out the broken
package's prerm, and then making the new version of the broken package
pre-depend on it work?

-- 
see shy jo