Bug#335276: transferring ownership of conffile to avoid dpkg prompt
# openoffice:
found 346282 2.0.1-5
# openssh:
found 335276 1:4.2p1-8
thanks
# This seems to affect upgrades from sarge "mysql-server" but not
# "mysql-server-4.1":
reassign 345113 mysql-server-5.0
reopen 345113
found 345113 5.0.22-2
On Thu, Jun 15, 2006 at 11:34:00AM -0400, pryzbyj wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 15, 2006 at 11:46:41AM +0200, Bill.Allombert@math.u-bordeaux1.fr wrote:
> > On Wed, Jan 25, 2006 at 10:56:27PM -0500, Justin Pryzby wrote:
> > > At least 4 major packages are presently affected by conffile prompts
> > > during upgrades from Sarge to current testing, because the name of the
> > > package owning some conffile changed. When dpkg queries "what is the
> > > md5sum of the old conffile", it probably looks only for md5sums of
> > > files owned by the old package, and so finds nothing, and the usual
> > > logic doesn't apply.
> > >
> > > See also bullet 3 of Bill Allombert's message titled "Some bits of
> > > experience gained from handling upgrade-reports"; this is a similar
> > > situation:
> > > http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2005/06/msg00006.html
> > >
> > > Bill's simple recipe is to remove the conffile in preinst if the
> > > md5sum of the conffile matches that of the stable version.
> > > http://dpkg.org/ has an even better example, which plays nicely even
> > > for upgrades from versions not in the stable release; it works by
> > > parsing the dpkg status database with sed (and not distinguising
> > > between which package owns a conffile).
> >
> > Hello Rene,
> >
> > We really have to fix this problem before the release.
> >
> > What can I do so that this bug is finally addressed ?
> > Would you accept a patch that remove the offending file in the preinst
> > if the md5sum match the sarge version ?
> Were you able to reproduce the bug? I tried briefly (with current
> dpkg) and failed. I suspect that upgrading dpkg first will solve the
> problem; but, for etch, there should probably be a package-specific
> "workarounds", so that users don't get prompted even if they don't
> upgrade dpkg first (I don't know if this will be in the release notes,
> or why it would be..).
The prompt is experienced for these three packages when upgrading with
the sarge dpkg, but not with current etch dpkg. Upgrading dpkg wasn't
in the sarge release notes, only aptitude and doc-base were. I don't
suppose openoffice can justify a predepency on dpkg (and even that
might not guarantee a new dpkg invocation before installing OOO).
There's no reason to have to manually upgrade it; whatever packages
haven't fixed this yet should still do so; etch+1 won't need such
things, since dpkg will be guaranteed to be of a sufficiently recent
version.
Please see jadetex as an example of how to implement this using dpkg
error handling rollbacks, too. You should probably run sed on the
dpkg status database instead of using a hardcoded value, though.
BTW, it occurs to me that the dpkg "obsolete" field destroys most
peoples' md5sum extraction from the status file, since dpkg.org
recommends s/.* //, the md5sum will be "obsolete". I'm not sure when
this interaction will happen, but it means alot of scripts are
broken.. Note that people using awk '{print $2}' or cut -d' ' -f3 or
whatever will get the right result. I don't know if this matters much
in practice, since I guess dpkg will handle the removal automatically.
I suspect that it won't do the right thing on conffile "move" though I
don't have an example.
Justin
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