Re: cleaning up dead triggers

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

On Fri, 2021-07-02 at 16:26:19 +0200, Christoph Anton Mitterer wrote:
> I've recently noted that my systems have files in
> /var/lib/dpkg/triggers, which are no longer there on fresh
> installations.

All of your systems? Do they all contain the same files?

> For example:
> /var/lib/dpkg/triggers/resolvconf-event
> /var/lib/dpkg/triggers/rkhunter-update-database
> 
> which seem to have been previously used by their respective packages
> (before being renamed) and are now empty.

The changelogs for these packages seem to mention these having been
renamed around 2011, dpkg only started doing fsync() for these files
in 1.15.6 (around 2010, but the release that included the 1.15.x
happened around 2011), perhaps you had system crashes then while using
ext4 or a similarly new filesystem, when running with the old dpkg?

> Not sure if /var/lib/dpkg/triggers/Unincorp is another leftover (at
> least it's empty).

That's the file holding the pending triggers. It's expected to be
empty, while there are no pending triggers.

> Shouldn't packages clean up old triggers like
> /var/lib/dpkg/triggers/resolvconf-event?

No, dpkg is supposed to do that.

Thanks,
Guillem