dpkg not changing the ownership of directories.

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

Hi all,

after banging my head for hours wondering why one given directory in a
pacakge I work on did not have the correct ownership (www-data), I
realised that that the answer is in the Policy, footnote #71.

  "... the permissions and ownership of directories already on the system
  does not change on install or upgrade of packages. This makes sense,
  since otherwise common directories like /usr would always be in flux.
  ..."

http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/footnotes.html#f71

So what happened is that first I made a (local) package with the wrong
permissions, and then any attempt to correct this was doomed as long as
I would not remove the package before installing a new version testing a
variation on how to call chown.

After a few hours of more thinking, I still do not understand the
footnote #71 of the Policy. Could somebody post an explanation?

Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan