Re: [stable] Possible fix for possible RC bug

[Frank Küster <frank@kuesterei.ch>]

Dear (stable) Release Managers,

nearly a year ago I asked about an update to stable, as copied below.
We never received an answer and forgot about it ourselves.  However, we
do keep getting bug reports about that issue.  

I'd be grateful if someone gave us a heads up:  Should we prepare an
upload with the line commented?

Regards, Frank

Frank Küster <frank@debian.org> wrote:

> Dear stable release managers,
>
> we have a bug report against our package texlive-base in stable that
> might be worth fixing in squeeze, or not.  Therefore I am asking your
> opinion. 
>
> There is buggy code in the preinst script that will fail each time it is
> called, leading to the preinst failing, hence the upgrade of the TeX
> system from anything older than stable to stable (or testing/sid, no
> changes yet).  This means the bug is RC, and since it is easy to fix
> (simply drop one line that calls the buggy code, because it is not in
> fact needed) we are considering fixing it in stable.
>
> However:
>
> The buggy code is in a conditional, and it we are unsure how often it
s/it//
> will be triggered.  The bug was once intended to clean up after a
s/bug/code/
> really
> bad brown paper bag bug in sid, during the lenny release cycle.  This
> means that nowadays, no system should meet the conditional unless it
> used sid at the time and has not been upgraded since then.  It should.
>
> However, it doesn't.  At least we do get bug reports.  We got them when
> lenny became stable, and again we got them when squeeze got stable.  And
> of course all the time people claimed that they never used sid TeX
> packages. See http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=612924.
> The last report was early in March
>
> What do you think - should we prepare an upload to stable?
>
> The patch would look like this:
>
> # Cleanup after Bug #420390 for sid users
> resurrect_conffile_sid /etc/texmf/metafont/misc/modes.mf texlive-base "$1" "$2"
> -resurrect_conffile_sid /etc/texmf/tex/generic/config/pdftexconfig.tex texlive-base "$1" "$2"
> +#resurrect_conffile_sid /etc/texmf/tex/generic/config/pdftexconfig.tex texlive-base "$1" "$2"
>
> plus the usual changelog etc.
>
> Regards, Frank

-- 
Frank Küster
Sprecher B90/Grüne OV Miltenberg und Umgebung
VCD Miltenberg, ADFC Aschaffenburg-Miltenberg
Debian Developer (TeXLive)