Solving the "removed conffiles" bug
Hi,
I planned to upload texlive-bin with a postinst that's supposed to fix
the problem of conffiles having been removed by tetex-base's postrm.
However, I think the package as currently in the repository doesn't
completely do what I intend. There are two, no actually three, groups
of users affected:
1. Those who run etch and have already purged tetex-base (i.e. before my
upload to stable is included in the next stable release)
2. Those who run testing and have already purged tetex-base
3. Those who run sid and have purged tetex-base before it was provided
by texlive.
For the first group, there are again two possible scenarios for
triggering the consequences:
1.a. dist-upgrade to a version with texlive 2007: This is the case our
current code deals with
1.b. a security upload of texlive-bin to etch, this will try to recreate
the formats and fail. In order to address this issue, we should
backport the solution for groups 2 and 3 after it's well tested,
and either request a stable update, or at least notify the security
team of the problems.
The second group will also get the new conffiles with the code we
currently have in SVN (it tests whether the last-configured version is
younger than 2007).
The problematic group are the sid users. From past experience, I fear
that there is quite a proportion of users who update their sid systems
irregularly. In other words, the dozen of bug reporters we already have
seen are not everyone, in particular since many might have refused to
update after apt-listbugs has shown them the "upgrade failed" RC bugs.
Therefore I think we should find a solution for them, too. Introducing
debconf prompts for those people is questionable. Stopping the
installation with an error because an essential conffile is missing
doesn't make much sense, either. What I think we could do is the
following:
- For all user groups, irrespective of the version (as long as it is
earlier than the one I'm going to upload), resurrect the conffiles.
If that is done, remember it in the script. Do that with all
conffiles, not only the essential ones needed for format generation.
- If the postinst has noted that it needed to resurrect conffiles,
display a debconf message about that, a short text referring to a
longer explanation in README.Debian, but long enough to be
understandable in its translated forms.
The debconf message should have a not-too-low priority, but I'm not sure
whether it should be a note (which debian-devel seems to regard as quite
obsolete) or an error (it's not really an error after all).
Regards, Frank
--
Dr. Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)
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