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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)




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