Re: does /var/games have to be deleted on purge? (if it's empty..)

[Sven Joachim <svenjoac@gmx.de>]

On 2009-04-06 19:59 +0200, Russ Allbery wrote:

> Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org> writes:
>
>> while testing the archive with piuparts I found a failure reported by
>> piuparts, that after purge /var/games existed on the system while it
>> wasnt there before installing+purging the package.
>>
>> See http://piuparts.debian.org/squeeze/fail/slashem-common_0.0.7E7F3-1.3.log 
>> (at the end..)
>
> I'm curious why it wasn't removed.  /var/games is normally shipped in each
> of the packages that provides files in /var/games, so dpkg would normally
> remove it automatically once the last game was removed from the system.

But not if the game actually writes highscore files there.  Those are
only removed on purge, at which point dpkg has already forgotten that
/var/games belonged to the package.

> It seems to have left it unowned, which implies to me that either some
> package created it in a maintainer script rather than just including the
> directory in the deb or you're running into the bug that I ran into with
> openafs where dpkg lost track of the owner of a directory (I can't find
> the bug number at the moment).

For /var/games and subdirectories this does not really hold due to the
additional files written there at runtime.

Sven