Bug#421345: lintian: does not alert on non-conffile symlink in /etc
Marc Haber <mh+debian-bugs@zugschlus.de> writes:
> Package: lintian
> Version: 1.23.29
> Severity: normal
(New feature requests are really wishlist, even if the feature would be
very nice to have. I try to keep normal for false positives and similar
problems that can lead people to not use lintian at all.)
> Hi,
> having a non-conffile symlink in /etc causes data loss on package
> installation if the symlink name was already there as a file
> (#420578). The file-in-etc-not-marked-as-conffile check does not seem to
> fire for symlinks.
> Please consider having lintian warn about this situation.
It's unclear to me from previous discussion whether symlinks are actually
supposed to be marked as conffiles, and even if they are, whether dpkg can
cope with them properly. I'm not sure that lintian should be encouraging
people to do something that dpkg doesn't handle.
Currently, from Bug#421344 that you reported, it looks like marking a
symlink as a conffile may cause failure to install later versions of the
package, which doesn't sound like something we should be recommending
currently.
Now, we could warn on symlinks in /etc in general, not to tell people to
make them conffiles but rather to point out this possible bug, but in that
case the bug only triggers if the symlink replaces something that was
previously a file, and lintian doesn't have a way of knowing that.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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