On Sat, 20 Aug 2022 at 00:09, Colin Watson <cjwat...@debian.org> wrote: > > On Fri, Aug 19, 2022 at 11:55:25PM +0100, Luca Boccassi wrote: > > On Fri, 19 Aug 2022 at 23:43, Colin Watson <cjwat...@debian.org> wrote: > > > I just had my attention drawn to this bug because a man-db upload > > > unexpectedly (to me) gained a dependency on systemd | systemd-tmpfiles, > > > thus adding to the build-essential set. /usr/lib/tmpfiles.d/man-db.conf > > > reads: > > > > > > d /var/cache/man 0755 man man 1w > > > > > > This line exists only for cleanup purposes; the directory is also > > > shipped in the package with matching ownership and permissions, so > > > man-db clearly doesn't rely on tmpfiles for creating that directory. > > > > Shipping files in /var in a package is a bug though, and it really > > needs to be fixed. So it sounds like in this case a dependency is > > indeed the right thing, given presence of the directory in /var is > > necessary? > > No. The actual FHS requirement is that the application must be able to > recover from deletion of files under /var/cache. The only part of the > package that I consider to be truly critical is man(1) itself, and that > continues to work just fine for most purposes even when /var/cache/man > has been entirely removed. While mandb(8) will fail, that isn't fatal > to the operation of the package; it will merely be somewhat degraded.
Yes. Variable state data != fixed and checksummed content of a binary package that fails a package integrity validation check if removed. Kind regards, Luca Boccassi
