On Wed, 09 Jul 2025 19:13:08 +0000 deb-bugs.r2x92@haxing.ninja wrote: > On 7/9/25 15:00, Adrian Bunk wrote: > > > From 2012 until November 2023 Ubuntu shipped a checkinstall that > > disabled file system translation by default: > > https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/checkinstall/+publishinghistory > > These reports seem to be related to that Ubuntu-only change? > > > > cu > > Adrian > > I think there are two true bugs related to those reports, neither of them > being the Ubuntu default. > > The first is that various things cannot build without --fstrans=no (because > the translation does not seem to work for what seem to be some pretty simple > shell scripts). > > The second is that --fstrans=no is DANGEROUS in its current implementation. > Even if you're using --fstrans=no I think users should be able to assume that > an interrupt should finish the restore to the prior file system state. This > is not people being bit by a build that does something nasty, this is the > tool breaking their system because they sent a SIGINT to it. > > We're not talking about SIGKILL here, checkinstall should clean up after > itself gracefully. > > - Wyatt
>From what i can see the defaults in debian do not break the system and i think just using --fstrans=no itself doesn't either (with a very simple test script for installation, maybe if the backup code triggers it might be worse). Do we have a concrete example of an invocation that breaks the system with the version in trixie? Of course checkinstall is from a time where doing all this safely was much harder than it would be today with namespaces and overlay fs. But do the current limitations make it useless? - Martin
