[Logcheck-devel] permissions issue with logcheck.conf after upgrade

[Ross Boylan]

On Mon, Dec 20, 2004 at 11:26:23PM -0500, Todd Troxell wrote:
> Hi Ross,
> 
> On Sun, Dec 19, 2004 at 06:12:38PM -0800, Ross Boylan wrote:
> > I ran into a little glitch after upgrading logcheck from 1.2.31 to
> > 1.2.32.  I think the cause was a peculiarity of my system, but in case
> > it's not, or it's worth a release note, I thought I'd let you know.
> 
> A change was made to the default logcheck.conf in .32, so maybe it was
> overwritten with bad permissions somehow?
I believe rcs overwrote it with a bad group.  More below.
> 
> Did you actually install the deb?  
Yes.
> Our postinst should have set the correct
> permissions.
It did.

I had a chance to follow the installation on another system.
post-install things were OK.  I had said N to the update logcheck.conf
question. Then I edited logcheck.conf under RCS (via emacs, if it
matters) and checked in the new version (after merging in some changes
from logcheck.conf.dpkg-dist).  This changed the group to root from
logcheck for logcheck.conf.

I notice the file in the RCS repository is also group root, so maybe
rcs is using that as its guide.  The man page to rcs co says it uses
the permissions of the archive file, though it doesn't explitly
mention issues of file ownership.  My last rcs edit before this was on
2004/09/17.  It's a little odd I didn't run into this problem then.

I put logcheck under rcs before 1.2.19-2, when the permissions
changed.

Theory: logcheck was root:root (user:group) when put under rcs, and
this is reflected in the rcs ,v file.  When I do another ci -l, these
old ownerships are reset.

If this theory is correct, the problem has almost nothing to do with
the latest release.  The release happened to update logcheck.conf,
which triggered a problem for me that I would have whenever I update
logcheck.conf.

The real source of the problem is the interaction of the
ownership/identity changes in 1.2.19-2 and rcs.  This falls under
"things I should know as an rcs user."  You might add a note "be sure
your version control system doesn't wipe out our changes to file
ownership and permission" to help those of us who didn't realize this
wrinkle.  Doing nothing at all would be reasonable too.