Bug#22935: PROPOSED] Do not make hardlinks to conffiles

[Chris Waters <xtifr@dsp.net>]

On Tue, Jun 20, 2000 at 11:00:59PM +0100, Julian Gilbey wrote:

> (2) The sysadmin upgrades the foo package.  Dpkg notices that
>     /etc/foo.conf has changed and offers to upgrade it.  The sysadmin
>     agrees.  Now what happened seems to be that after this (and I
>     don't quite know how this works exactly) /etc/foo.conf is mv'ed to
>     /etc/foo.conf.dpkg-old, /var/pkg/conf remains a hard link to it,
>     that is to /etc/foo.conf.dpkg-old, and /etc/foo.conf is the new
>     conffile.  But now the /var/pkg/conf file is the old conffile and
>     /etc/foo.conf is the new one.  Oops.

Ah, I see what you're saying.  You're talking about the case where the
package actually *contains* the hard link, rather than, say, making it
in the post-inst.  Yes, that will definitely break badly.

In that case, I suggest changing the first line of the proposal from:

  A package may not make hard links to conffiles.

to:

  A package may not contain hard links to conffiles.

I still support the proposal, with or without my proposed change, but
I do think it's a little more clear as I phrased it.

cheers
-- 
Chris Waters   xtifr@dsp.net | I have a truly elegant proof of the
      or    xtifr@debian.org | above, but it is too long to fit into
                             | this .signature file.