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

[Bill Allombert <allomber@math.u-bordeaux.fr>]

On Fri, Apr 08, 2005 at 08:48:56PM -0500, Rob Browning wrote:
> 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):

For reference, here a snippet from the postinst:

if [ -d ${parentdir} ]
then
  if mkdir ${parentdir}/${newdir} 2>/dev/null
  then
    chown root:staff ${parentdir}/${newdir}
    chmod 2775 ${parentdir}/${newdir}
  fi
fi

As far as I am concerned, I find it 100% correct.  If the mkdir succeed
but the chown or chmod fail then something is wrong and should not be
silently ignored (see 6.1. Introduction to package maintainer scripts).
I would consider it a bug to ignore them.

Given the way /usr/local is integrated in Debian, storing it in a
filesystem that does not support chown and chmod will cause lot of
breakage and is not supported.

Cheers,
-- 
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>

Imagine a large red swirl here.