Package: cruft Version: 0.9.6-0.4 Severity: important
1.Outline There seems to be a design flaw in cruft's filter mechanism. In some ways this is a 'wishlist' bug, but I've tagged it 'important' because - cruft's filters cause it to overlook cruft that it could and should find; - with the current design, as cruft's filters improve so the problem worsens. The good news is that the flaw is not hard to fix. I'm providing what I think is an almost complete solution. 2.The problem Consider this common situation: package 'foo' (1) contains an extra file '/foo/bar' that dpkg wouldn't normally know about, and (2) forgets to delete /foo/bar when foo is purged. Alice installs package 'foo'. She wants cruft to ship with a filter /usr/lib/cruft/filters/foo so that /foo/bar is not reported as 'unexplained'. But Bob also installs 'foo', and later he purges it. He doesn't want cruft to use the filter /usr/lib/cruft/filters/foo. [A real-life example: purging package 'inewsinn' leaves crufty files like '/etc/news/whoami'. Cruft is unable to report them because of the filter named 'inn' - even if package 'inn' was never installed.] Moreover, as cruft's filters improve with each new release (giving fewer false positives) so cruft's ability to detect when these files become crufty diminishes (giving more false negatives, so to speak). The more you please Alice, the less you please Bob. It's a zero-sum game! 3.A solution I believe there is a good solution: cruft should use *all* of the locally provided filters /etc/cruft/filters, but only *some* of the filters shipped with cruft. It should use filter /usr/lib/cruft/filters/<foo> if and only if package <foo> seems to be installed on the system. This can be done by modifying the script /usr/lib/cruft/extrafiles, see attachment. For this to be a complete solution, something needs to be done about the filters not named after a package. I believe they should be abolished. For example: file current filter name proposed filter name /etc/localtime timezones libc6 /var/log/lastlog lastlog login This is better, eg it is libc6.postinst which creates /etc/localtime. -- System Information: Debian Release: 3.1 Architecture: i386 (i686) Kernel: Linux 2.4.27-2-686 Locale: LANG=en_GB, LC_CTYPE=en_GB (charmap=ISO-8859-1) Versions of packages cruft depends on: ii file 4.12-1 Determines file type using "magic" ii libc6 2.3.2.ds1-22 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an -- debconf-show failed
extrafiles
Description: application/shellscript
