Hi Jonathan,
On 2013-05-02 00:52, Jonathan Nieder wrote:
Hi,
Filipus Klutiero wrote:
Thanks for your opinion, but a misbehavior from dpkg is a bug, not
/merely/ a request for enhancement as implied by the /wishlist/
severity.
I suppose you misunderstood Guillem's response. The current behavior
when a package installs files not contained in any other package but
already present on the filesystem is (in my opinion, at least)
correct. Some packages even rely on it, as Guillem explained.
I'm not sure what I would have misunderstood in Guillem's response. As I explained, there
are security issues with the quiet and brutal overwriting of files. Regarding packages
relying on the current behavior, as I wrote, there should be no need to change the
behavior in those cases ("Such a switch must already require prompting, unless the
file is left intact, in which case we need not to prompt any more than we currently
do.")
That doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement, though. As
Guillem also mentioned, it would be useful for there to be a way to
inform dpkg about files not contained in any package. Then a sysadmin
could easily tell dpkg whether it is okay to overwrite the named
files, and it would be possible to come up with a coherent policy for
how to deal with unregistered files.
I don't quite follow here. I apparently missed what Guillem said on this. But I can't really see
how a database would "tell dpkg whether it is okay to overwrite the named files". If I
correctly understand the suggestion, it does solve "half" of the cases (those where the
problematic paths are found in the database), but it leaves the other cases unsolved.
Moreover, that solution sounds quite a bit more complicated to me than simply
checking the paths are unused and prompting if some are.
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