Package: dpkg Version: 1.20.6 Severity: grave Justification: breaks unrelated packages by removing their conffiles
Hi Guillem, attached is a small package demonstrating the misbehavior of remove-on-upgrade which may delete symlink targets. It builds foo.deb (which has 'remove-on-upgrade /etc/old-conffile') and bar.deb (which has /etc/old-conffile -> /etc/new-conffile). # dpkg -i /tmp/bar_1_all.deb Selecting previously unselected package bar. (Reading database ... 14303 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to unpack /tmp/bar_1_all.deb ... Unpacking bar (1) ... Setting up bar (1) ... # dpkg --verify bar # dpkg -i /tmp/foo_1_all.deb Selecting previously unselected package foo. (Reading database ... 14307 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to unpack /tmp/foo_1_all.deb ... Unpacking foo (1) ... Setting up foo (1) ... Obsolete conffile '/etc/new-conffile' has been modified by you. Saving as /etc/new-conffile.dpkg-old ... # dpkg --verify bar ??5?????? c /etc/new-conffile The actual bug where I encountered this misbehavior is #994971: OpenCL not working with latest Nvidia driver and it was an error of debhelper converting rm_conffile to remove-on-upgrade but dpkg played its part by deleting the symlink target instead of the symlink itself, but it should rather do nothing (or print a diagnostic) if the to-be-removed file is not a plain file. At least there is an error if it is a directory: # mkdir /etc/old-conffile # dpkg -i /tmp/foo_1_all.deb Selecting previously unselected package foo. (Reading database ... 14304 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to unpack /tmp/foo_1_all.deb ... Unpacking foo (1) ... Setting up foo (1) ... dpkg: warning: foo: conffile '/etc/old-conffile' is not a plain file or symlink (= '/etc/old-conffile') Simplified, the nvidia use case the following: Long ago, /etc/conffile was a conffile That was later removed with rm_conffile and since then the different co-installable drivers ship /etc/conffile-$driver_version instead and a slave alternative exists as /etc/conffile pointing to the corresponding file of the activated driver variant. (The different drivers may require slightly different conffile content.) Andreas
dpkg-bug-remove-on-upgrade.tar.gz
Description: application/gzip
