Re: Problem with lprng after reboot.

[Rob Browning <osiris@cs.utexas.edu>]

Tony Finch <fanf@lspace.org> writes:

> I just noticed this problem. The ownership of /var/spool/lpd has
> changed to root.root, wheras it should be root.lp. I changed the
> permission manually and it then worked. Hmm. I don't know what caused
> this to happen.

Wow, you win the prize.  I had the same problem.  I don't know if this
fixes my original complaint because I'll have to reboot to check, and
I can't do that right now, but at least it might.

I wonder if this is another manifestation of the "dpkg tar problem".
I can't recall exactly what I discovered the problem was, but I think
it was something like

"if a directory already exists on your file system, even its
permissions are different from what's in the tarfile (deb file),
installing the package will *not* update the permissions."

This seems to be clearly wrong, but no one has really complained yet,
though it did cause some problems with base-files when the original
version was released with bad permissions on some directories.

The only way I know of to handle this is to get the permissions right
in the initial package release, or if mistakes are made, add commands
to the package's postinst to correct the permissions.

I don't know if the same problem occurs with files in the tarfile.

Thanks
-- 
Rob