Re: CVS frank tetex-base: add fixes to close the /usr/local bug (#292752)
uwe@steinmann.cx (Uwe Steinmann) schrieb:
> Hi,
>
> I'm not sure if what I experience today when most of my tetex was updated
> is related to the bug below, but it appears to be.
>
> I used to have a soft link /usr/local pointing to /software/local.
> Basically for historical reasons.
> After updating tetex from sid today this link disappeared and a
> directory /usr/local/share/texmf had been created with an ls-R file
> in it.
Im an not completely sure, but I think the reason is the bug that was
fixed by yesterday's upload. The problem is that in 2.0.2c-4, we
included /usr/local/share/texmf in the deb, which is against
policy. When this version was installed, dpkg created that directory
(which was in fact /software/local/share/texmf). Do you know whether you
had this directory?
During the upgrade to 2.0.c-5 the following things seem to have happened
(this is a bit simplified wrt dpkg's behavior):
- first, dpkg removed all the files from the old version, including
/usr/local/share/texmf.
- It noticed that no other package had any files registered below
/usr/local (because this is not allowed, and that we did it was a
bug).
- Therefore, as it usually does with such empty directories, it removed
it. It did this although it was a symlink, and this is an odd behavior
of dpkg. Feel free to dig through its huge bug list to find out
whether this has been reported yet. I count it as "feature or at least
a bug that everybody should expect to be there".
- After that, the postinst script of the new version did (nearly) what
it was designed to do: it tried to create /usr/local/share/texmf. I
wrote nearly, because it should have created it only if
/usr/local/share already existed. I will correct this at once.
Regards, Frank
--
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer
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