Re: Bug#303596: Emacs installation fails on vfat fs

[Rob Browning <rlb@defaultvalue.org>]

Stephen Gildea <gildea@stop.mail-abuse.org> writes:

> The postinst script does several chown and chmod operations on
> subdirectories of /usr/local/share/.  If these fail, the script
> fails (it runs with sh -e) and the package installation fails.  This
> is too severe, as the chown/chmod failure can be innocuous.
>
> I have my /usr/local/share mounted on a VFAT partition.  The VFAT
> file system doesn't have the concept of file owner or modes.  The
> Linux kernel reports all chown and chmod operations here as failing.
>
> But failing to do a chown or chmod of these directories is not
> important enough to cause package installation to fail on any file
> system.

Before I'd be willing to change this, I'd need to hear from
debian-policy that such a change would be acceptable.  Current policy
specifies both the "set -e" (6.1) and these specific permissions on
/usr/local/ and its subdirectories (9.1.2):

  http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-opersys.html
  http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-maintainerscripts.html

I'm copying this to debian-policy so that they may comment.

Thanks
-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org and @debian.org; previously @cs.utexas.edu
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