Bug#993753: debhelper: remove-on-upgrade in DEBIAN/conffiles is not equivalent to 'dpkg-maintscript-helper rm_conffile' in maintscripts
Package: debhelper
Severity: normal
X-Debbugs-CC: debian-lint-maint@lists.debian.org
Hi,
The Lintian maintainers recently made several accommodations [1] for
some of the new features coming in Debhelper, but it is not clear from
Lintian's own packaging efforts that the 'remove-on-upgrade' attribute
in conffiles always works as intended. For a recent Lintian artifact
built on unstable [2] the development version of Lintian produces the
following hint:
E: lintian: conffile-is-not-in-package etc/lintianrc
Lintian prides itself on provoking no hints [3] so the matter received
some attention. Upon inspection, it seems debhelper turned the
instruction in d/lintian.maintscript
rm_conffile /etc/lintianrc 2.90.0~ lintian
into that line in DEBIAN/conffiles
remove-on-upgrade /etc/lintianrc
but those two ideas are not the same! Lintian has not shipped
/etc/lintianrc for some time. [4]
Debhelper also stopped inserting those generated lines in the
maintainer scripts (and in fact shipped no scripts at all):
# Automatically added by dh_installdeb/13.2.1
dpkg-maintscript-helper rm_conffile /etc/lintianrc 2.90.0\~ lintian -- "$@"
# End automatically added section
For this inquiry, we compared the recent build artifacts from Salsa CI
[2] with the Lintian version 2.104.0 currently in unstable.
I believe this is a bug in Debhelper. Please let us know if you concur
with our analysis. Thank you!
Kind regards
Felix Lechner
[1] https://salsa.debian.org/lintian/lintian/-/commit/b8c88b5a604c541d1389c1f7e3eb6315ac80f1d9
[2] https://salsa.debian.org/lintian/lintian/-/jobs/1914634/artifacts/browse/debian/output/
[3] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=993711#5
[4] https://salsa.debian.org/lintian/lintian/-/commit/4b878e14d9758f7b44210ae65fc26acd30c67dc6
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