Hi Scott, thanks for the bug report.
Scott Walsh wrote: > aptitude install zsh, which lead to packages being in the 'half' > installed state. Attempting to purge was unsucessful. Had to resort to > dpkg --remove --force-remove-reinstreq zsh zsh-common to resolve the > issue. That's strange, because I would expect that piuparts would find such issues, but definitely didn't, neither at https://piuparts.debian.org/sid/source/z/zsh.html nor at http://jenkins.grml.org/view/Debian/job/zsh-piuparts/ > Preparing to unpack .../zsh-common_5.0.7-4_all.deb ... > dpkg-maintscript-helper: error: original symlink target is not an > absolute path > dpkg: error processing archive > /var/cache/apt/archives/zsh-common_5.0.7-4_all.deb (--unpack): This is clearly something which was introduced by one of the fixes in 5.0.7-4 as we didn't use dpkg-maintscript-helper before. I tried to reproduce this issue in a freshly bootstrapped jessie chroot, but couldn't (which doesn't surprise me much as piuparts couldn't either). So we need to see what so special in your setup. One thing which is a good candidate for such a failure is a too old dpkg version. Both, zsh and zsh-common have a "Pre-Depends: dpkg (>= 1.17.5)" because of this, but maybe that Pre-Depends is not strict enough (despite it has been set by debhelper for using dpkg-maintscript-helper with symlink_to_dir. But reading dpkg's changelog.Debian.gz, I find the following entry for 1.17.14: * Add support for relative symlinks to dpkg-maintscript-helper symlink_to_dir command. [...] So I suspect this happened with a dpkg version < 1.17.14 and we likely need to bump that Pre-Depends to >= 1.17.14. Cc'ing debhelper-devel to make them aware of this potential issue. debhelper maintainers: Shall I clone or reassign this bug report to debhelper for bumping ${misc:Pre-Depends} in such cases? To be sure that my assumption is correct: Scott, can you tell me the dpkg version which was running at that time. If the dpkg has changed since then or was upgraded in the same run, please look in /var/log/aptitude or /var/log/dpkg.log which was installed when that error happened. (Verifying that dpkg was either uptodate in Jessie or below version 1.17.14 at the time when this happened should suffice.) Regards, Axel -- ,''`. | Axel Beckert <a...@debian.org>, http://people.debian.org/~abe/ : :' : | Debian Developer, ftp.ch.debian.org Admin `. `' | 1024D: F067 EA27 26B9 C3FC 1486 202E C09E 1D89 9593 0EDE `- | 4096R: 2517 B724 C5F6 CA99 5329 6E61 2FF9 CD59 6126 16B5 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
