Bug#541872: debian-policy: identical notation for disabled-by-user and auto-generated entries in /etc/inetd.conf

[Serafeim Zanikolas <serzan@hellug.gr>]

Package: debian-policy
Version: 3.8.2.0
Severity: normal

Hello policy makers :)

update-inetd is seriously bug infested, IMHO to some extent because of the
issue below.

Policy 11.2 says:

    If a package wants to install an example entry into `/etc/inetd.conf', the
    entry must be preceded with exactly one hash character (`#').  Such lines
    are treated as "commented out by user" by the `update-inetd' script and
    are not changed or activated during package updates.
    [presumably, "not changed" here implies also "not deleted"]

Effectively this means that we cannot distinguish between two entirely
different things: local-admin-policy and examples generated by postinst
maintainer scripts.

Now how does this lead to bugs? Say I install ftp-daemon-a, which adds an
example entry to /etc/inetd.conf, and then I uninstall the package.  The
example entry will survive the package's removal (even if prerm calls
update-inetd, it won't be removed because it's indistinguishable from
local-admin-policy).

Then I decide to install ftp-daemon-b. If the package's postinst calls
update-inetd to enable the new service, the new entry won't be added because
it's apparently local-admin-policy that ftp should be disabled.

A potential fix would be to prescribe that example entries added by maintainer
scripts are preceded with '#<example># ' (to be consistent with '#<off># '
which is what update-inetd uses by default to denote disabled entries).

Cheers,
Serafeim

-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (100, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.26-1-686 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=el_GR.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

debian-policy depends on no packages.

debian-policy recommends no packages.

Versions of packages debian-policy suggests:
pn  doc-base                      <none>     (no description available)

-- no debconf information