Bug#1109499: bacula-director-sqlite3: fails to dist-upgrade from bookworm to trixie

[Niels Thykier]

clone 1109499 -1
clone 1109499 -2
retitle 1109499 bacula-common: preinst intentionally breaks upgrade
retitle -1 dpkg: Silent on invoking postinst abort-upgrade
reassign -1 dpkg
# Annoying to debug but not RC in itself
severity -1 important
retitle -2 bacula-common: Silent when aborting the upgrade
severity -2 important

thanks

On Sat, 19 Jul 2025 11:40:14 +0200 Chris Hofstaedtler <z...@debian.org> wrote:

On Sat, Jul 19, 2025 at 11:06:17AM +0200, Niels Thykier wrote:
> FWIW, I checked the stable version of bacula-common and it has the same
> story. The `systemd-tmpfiles` call only appears in the `postinst`, so there
> is no way I can find that a `bacula-common.preinst` call would trigger

It turns out multiple issues are involved here:

1) bacula-common's preinst fails



3) dpkg does not inform us that it calls abort-upgrade.





IMO the default needs to become <Yes>.

Best,
Chris

> `systemd-tmpfiles` 2) because of the preinst failure, dpkg calls abort-upgrade; in this step systemd-tmpfiles fails. This is because libc6 did not get upgraded yet, which is caused by #1108193 Looking at 1) closer, it appears bacula-common intentionally defaults to breaking upgrades, by means of defaulting a debconf question of "Do you want to continue with the upgrade?" to <No>. I doubt this is acceptable. bacula-common already skips the question under piuparts, which seems to me like a hack. Other automated tools (QA or configuration management tools) are not considered.

Thanks for debugging this.




@Bacula team: I have split this into two bugs for you.

 - #1109499 remains RC and is about preinst defaulting to fail on a
   non-interactive upgrade test.

 - A new bug (important) about the preinst being silent on aborting
   the upgrade. It would have helped a lot of the preinst had explicitly
   echo'ed "Aborting upgrade as requested" (or something along those
   lines), as it would have been easier to identify the root cause
   here



Best regards,
Niels

I have cloned and reassign a bug for `dpkg` to make it announce postinst abort-upgrade, so this becomes less of a problem in the future. @Guillem: Concretely, the issue is we were only informed about `preinst` failing but in reality `preinst` failed and then `postinst abort-upgrade` failed as well. The output we saw from the maintscript itself was from `postinst` (the preinst failure was silent, so the postinst failure was the only output we had to go from). Thanks to Lucas and Chris for their work identifying the bug and finding the root cause.

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