Bug#366107: Installing tex-common gets stuck after giving invalid group for owning fonts
Helge Hafting <helgehaf@aitel.hist.no> wrote:
> Package: tex-common
> Version: 0.21
> Severity: normal
>
>
> I did a routine dist-upgrade.
> tex-common asked what group should own the font cache, and I
> misspelled the group name.
>
> The first thing that happened was chown balking at the invalid
> group name, causing a fault in "post-installation".
Thanks for reporting, this is something we never tried.
> My next try, which I consider excessive:
> dpkg --force-depends --remove tex-common
> apt-get install tex-common
> And it _still_ tried to use the bad group without giving
> me a chance to fix it.
That is expected - debconf settings are only changed upon purge, and so
is the "seen" status of questions.
> Final attempt, fortunately tex-common doesn't have
> that many settings:
> dpkg --force-depends --purge tex-common
> apt-get install tex-common
>
> Still no questions asked,
Now this is surprising. I'll try that out.
> preconfiguring failed,
Can you tell us how?
> Now, the ideal fix would be a package system that offers
> the option of reconfiguring packages that fail post-installation.
That would be a nice add on, but on the other hand postinst scripts
should never fail (or if they do, they should clearly indicate why and
how to fix this).
> A nice fix for tex-common, would be to do minimal validation
> of the group name entered. For example, see if
> "getent groupname" works. Shellscript test:
>
> if getent group $GROUPNAME ; then echo ok ; else echo bad ; fi
>
> This works for me, of course you want to do better than "echo",
> i.e. bring up the group dialog box again on failure.
That sounds like a very good way to do it; many thanks.
> -- debconf-show failed
Did you notice that? Maybe something else is also broken with respect
to debconf.
Regards, Frank
--
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX)
Reply to: