sgml-base related conffile prompt

[Helmut Grohne <helmut@subdivi.de>]

Dear release team,

TL;DR: This issue is fixable with 18 binNMUs of which 14 are arch:all.

On Sun, Apr 07, 2013 at 05:46:57PM +0100, Adam D. Barratt wrote:
> We can move discussion of the conffile issue to a new bug / thread if
> needed.

Let me give you some data on this. The basic issue was first found by
Andreas Beckmann as #681194. Packages built with squeeze debhelper would
create package catalogs using packaging scripts and only remove them on
purge. With the wheezy version package catalogs were turned into
conffiles, but I forgot to properly handle the removed-but-not-purged
case. Upon installation of a rebuilt package the previous left-over
package catalog would be treated as a modified configuration file. This
was fixed in debhelper/9.20120830 (migrated). It can indeed affect
upgrades from squeeze to wheezy, if a package removed by an
administrator is later reintroduced as a dependency during the upgrade.

Being a bug in the debhelper snippet the only way to solve this issue is
to rebuild all packages using dh_installcatalogs. This absolutely cannot
be fixed with a single upload of sgml-base, because it isn't hooked into
preinst.

This issue can also not be tracked using the transition tracker, because
there is no difference in depended-upon versions. To track completion of
this issue, the relevant binary packages have to be grepped.

I wrote two simple scripts to do the analysis. The first is to collect
relevant packages.

=====
#!/bin/sh
apt-cache rdepends sgml-base |
grep '^ ' |
xargs apt-cache show -t unstable |
sed 's,^Filename: ,http://your-mirror/debian/,;t;d' |
sort -u
=====

Once you have a set of .deb files, they can be analyzed with a second
script.

=====
VER=`dpkg-deb -f "$1" Depends | sed 's_.*sgml-base\([^,]*\).*_\1_;t;d'`
if test "$VER" != " (>= 1.26+nmu2)"; then
        echo "$1: unrelated"; exit 0
fi
if dpkg-deb -I "$1" preinst | grep -q '^if test -f /etc/sgml/.* -a "(" "\$1" = "upgrade" -o "\$1" = "install" -a -n "\$2" ")" &&'; then
        echo "$1: fixed"; exit 0
fi
if dpkg-deb -I "$1" preinst | grep -q '^if \[ "\$1" = "upgrade" \] && ! dpkg-query -S /etc/sgml/.* >/dev/null 2>&1; then'; then
        echo "$1: affected"; exit 0
fi
echo "$1: undetermined"
=====

Here is the result from my sid work machine (as a lower bound of what
would need to be fixed).

=====
debiandoc-sgml_1.2.27_all.deb: affected
docbook-dsssl_1.79-7_all.deb: affected
docbook-ebnf_1.2~cr1-5.1_all.deb: affected
docbook-html-forms_1.1.0-4.1_all.deb: affected
docbook-mathml_1.1CR1-2_all.deb: affected
docbook-simple_1.1-4.1_all.deb: affected
docbook-slides_3.4.0-5_all.deb: fixed
docbook-website_2.5.0.0-8_all.deb: affected
docbook-xml_4.5-7.1_all.deb: affected
docbook_4.5-5.1_all.deb: affected
docutils-common_0.10-1_all.deb: fixed
festival_2.1~release-5.1_amd64.deb: fixed
jade_1.2.1-47.1+b1_amd64.deb: affected
libcommons-validator-java_1.3.1-9_all.deb: affected
linuxdoc-tools_0.9.68_amd64.deb: affected
metacity-common_2.34.3-4_all.deb: fixed
muffin-common_1.7.2-1_all.deb: fixed
openjade1.3_1.3.2-11.1+b1_amd64.deb: affected
openjade_1.4devel1-20.1+b1_amd64.deb: affected
opensp_1.5.2-10_amd64.deb: unrelated
psgml_1.3.2-14_all.deb: unrelated
sgml-base-doc_1.99.1_all.deb: unrelated
sgml-data_2.0.8_all.deb: affected
sgml2x_1.0.0-11.3_all.deb: affected
sgmltools-lite_3.0.3.0.cvs.20010909-17_all.deb: unrelated
w3-dtd-mathml_2.0.0.0-5_all.deb: affected
w3c-dtd-xhtml_1.2-4_all.deb: affected
xemacs21-support_21.4.22-4_all.deb: unrelated
xml-core_0.13+nmu2_all.deb: fixed
xml2rfc_1.36-5_all.deb: fixed
xmlto_0.0.25-2_amd64.deb: unrelated
=====

Summary
~~~~~~~
unrelated: 6
fixed:     7
affected: 18
 - all:   14
 - any:   4

What do you think about the RCness of this issue? Should it be fixed for
wheezy? Adam already indicated that he leans towards "no".

Helmut