On Tue, Jun 09, 2015 at 12:48:58AM +0200, Andreas Beckmann wrote:
> Package: elinks
> Version: 0.12~pre6-7
> Severity: serious
> User: debian...@lists.debian.org
> Usertags: piuparts
>
> Hi,
>
> an upgrade test with piuparts revealed that your package installs files
> over existing symlinks and possibly overwrites files owned by other
> packages. This usually means an old version of the package shipped a
> symlink but that was later replaced by a real (and non-empty)
> directory. This kind of overwriting another package's files cannot be
> detected by dpkg.
>
> This was observed on the following upgrade paths:
>
>
> For /usr/share/doc/PACKAGE this may not be problematic as long as both
> packages are installed, ship byte-for-byte identical files and are
> upgraded in lockstep. But once one of the involved packages gets
> removed, the other one will lose its documentation files, too,
> including the copyright file, which is a violation of Policy 12.5:
> https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-docs.html#s-copyrightfile
>
> For other overwritten locations anything interesting may happen.
>
> Note that dpkg intentionally does not replace directories with symlinks
> and vice versa, you need the maintainer scripts to do this.
> See in particular the end of point 4 in
> https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-maintainerscripts.html#s-unpackphase
>
> It is recommended to use the dpkg-maintscript-helper commands
> 'dir_to_symlink' and 'symlink_to_dir' (available since dpkg 1.17.14)
> to perform the conversion, ideally using d/$PACKAGE.mainstscript.
> Do not forget to add 'Pre-Depends: ${misc:Pre-Depends}' in d/control.
> See dpkg-maintscript-helper(1) and dh_installdeb(1) for details.
Thanks for the report. Are you aware of any packages who made a similar
switch?
Cheers,
Moritz
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