calling MAKEDEV from postinst

[Paul Slootman <paul@debian.org>]

I got a bug report, marked "serious", on isdnutils today.

It concerns the fact that MAKEDEV is called from the postinst to create
the required ISDN devices, without first asking the user for permission.

Apparently this is policy, although no one seems to know why it exists
(a search of policy archives leads to
http://lists.debian.org/debian-policy-0007/msg00138.html which addresses
this, but that never got answered).

There are other packages that do this. Should all of those have serious
bugs reported against them, or should a bug against policy be reported?
After all, in my case, the user has chosen to install stuff for ISDN;
asking whether the ISDN devices may be created comes across as being a
bit retarded IMO.

Please CC me, I'm not on d-policy.


Paul Slootman