Re: 2.2r3-to-2.2r4 upgrade problem
On Fri, Nov 30, 2001 at 01:26:50PM -0700, Mike Fontenot wrote:
> I just did an upgrade to 2.2r4 (from 2.2r3). It
> seemed to go well, except for one problem. One of
> the packages upgraded was groff (it's been on the
> security list for a good while).
I'm the groff maintainer.
> I discovered that the upgrade had written a new
> /usr/share/groff/font/devps/DESC file. This
> new file was identical to the old (2.2r3) one,
> except that the last line was omitted:
>
> printer lpr
>
> That is apparently what
> tells groff how to send the output to the
> printer. Restoring that line fixed the problem.
>
> But why was that line omitted? This seems like
> the kind of thing that's not supposed to happen...
> breaking things that were working fine.
It's not. The problem was that groff has a hidden build-dependency on
lpr: if it happens not to be installed on the build system (which it
wasn't - I don't have a printer) it won't add that print command. I
didn't know about this until you mentioned it just now, and because that
line is added during the build of the package I didn't see it when I
compared the source code line-by-line in my pre-upload checks.
This also affects testing and unstable, and probably has done for a long
time. Evidently not many people use 'groff -l', because I've never had
any bug reports about it. I'll fix it straight away in unstable, and see
if I can get a fix into the next stable release too.
My apologies for the inconvenience. Ironically, the groff security
upload was to protect some versions of lpr that call pic with root
privileges.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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