Bug#427774: changed behavior of update-alternatives (was: Bug#427774: tetex-bin fails to install, missing alternatives for oxdvi.bin)

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

severity 427774 serious
notfound 427774 2007-7
thanks

Dear dpkg developers,

dpkg 1.14.4 which migrated to testing recently seems to have introduced
a changed behavior of update-alternatives:

Florian Ladstaedter <flad@gmx.at> wrote:

> Package: tetex-bin
> Version: 3.0-30
> Severity: normal
[...]
>     Setting up tetex-bin (3.0-30) ...
>
>     Creating config file /etc/texmf/fmt.d/01tetex.cnf with new
>     version
>     No alternatives for oxdvi.bin.
>     dpkg: error processing tetex-bin (--configure):
>      subprocess post-installation script returned error exit
>      status 1

The postinst contains this code:

# upgrade from woody
    # since oxdvi is now integrated into xdvi, remove the symlinks
    update-alternatives --remove-all oxdvi.bin

which worked fine in etch even if oxdvi was never installed.  Is it
intended, and what's the recommended way of testing whether an obsolete
alternative is still present?  I think it would be good to document it,
there doesn't seem to be anything in the changelog, on the contrary, it
seems to indicate that --remove is supposed to work with non-existent
symlinks:

dpkg (1.14.0) unstable; urgency=low

  * Refactor update-alternatives code, with the side effect that now commands
    on non existing link group files will return an error code (except
    for --remove, now). Closes: #273407

(but there's one more "refactor update-alternatives" later on).

Regards, Frank

P.S. This bug is fixed in tetex in sid, so if you like you can take it,
with appropriate severity ;-)
-- 
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)