Helge Hafting <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Package: tex-common > Version: 0.21 > Severity: normal > > > I did a routine dist-upgrade. > tex-common asked what group should own the font cache, and I > misspelled the group name. > > The first thing that happened was chown balking at the invalid > group name, causing a fault in "post-installation".
Thanks for reporting, this is something we never tried. > My next try, which I consider excessive: > dpkg --force-depends --remove tex-common > apt-get install tex-common > And it _still_ tried to use the bad group without giving > me a chance to fix it. That is expected - debconf settings are only changed upon purge, and so is the "seen" status of questions. > Final attempt, fortunately tex-common doesn't have > that many settings: > dpkg --force-depends --purge tex-common > apt-get install tex-common > > Still no questions asked, Now this is surprising. I'll try that out. > preconfiguring failed, Can you tell us how? > Now, the ideal fix would be a package system that offers > the option of reconfiguring packages that fail post-installation. That would be a nice add on, but on the other hand postinst scripts should never fail (or if they do, they should clearly indicate why and how to fix this). > A nice fix for tex-common, would be to do minimal validation > of the group name entered. For example, see if > "getent groupname" works. Shellscript test: > > if getent group $GROUPNAME ; then echo ok ; else echo bad ; fi > > This works for me, of course you want to do better than "echo", > i.e. bring up the group dialog box again on failure. That sounds like a very good way to do it; many thanks. > -- debconf-show failed Did you notice that? Maybe something else is also broken with respect to debconf. Regards, Frank -- Frank Küster Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich Debian Developer (teTeX)
