pre-approval for fixing some important bugs discovered by piuparts for wheezy

[Andreas Beckmann <anbe@debian.org>]

Hi,

what's the release team opinion on fixing several "important" bugs for
wheezy? These are problems discovered by piuparts and all have bugs
filed long ago, usually with a sentence like "Getting the archive
piuparts-clean is a release goal since lenny". Some of them already have
patches attached, but most with no maintainer action.

If the release team will unblock such fixes (after individual inspection
of course), I'd go ahead and write patches, test the fixed packages in
piuparts and maybe NMU them and finally file unblock requests. Most of
them can go in through sid, but I remember at least one (less, not
cleaning up an obsolete pager alternative from the lenny age) will need
a tpu upload (which would be filed separately first) in addition to
fixing this in sid.
I expect the required changes to be rather trivial and non-intrusive, so
should be easy to review.

Currently I want to look especially at these problem classes:

* cronjob misbehaving (non-zero exit code or output produced) after
package removal, should be fixable by adding
  test -x /usr/bin/$PROGRAM || exit 0
about 3 packages
http://piuparts.debian.org/wheezy/cron_error_after_removal_error.html

* alternatives being left on the system after package purge (and
therefore dangling symlinks, possibly in /usr/bin or similar locations),
should be fixable by adding the missing update-alternatives --remove
call to prerm (or postinst if the alternative was in squeeze but is no
longer used in wheezy)
about 5-8 packages that need to be fixed, but many more that show this
problem due to dependencies: 15 in wheezy/sid, 324 after squeeze->wheezy
upgrade
http://piuparts.debian.org/wheezy/alternatives_after_purge_issue.html
http://piuparts.debian.org/squeeze2wheezy/alternatives_after_purge_issue.html

* ucf being used unconditionally during postrm purge, fixable by adding
the conditionals as in /usr/share/doc/ucf/examples/postrm
(if which ucf 2>/dev/null ; then ucf ...)
about 12 packages in wheezy
http://piuparts.debian.org/wheezy/command_not_found_error.html

I'm now starting to pursue these myself since I can finally fix them
without requiring a sponsor :-)

Andreas