[Openstack-devel] Bug#677400: This is not a bug, it is a feature!

Thomas Goirand thomas at goirand.fr
Mon Jun 18 12:25:58 UTC 2012


On 06/18/2012 03:51 PM, Loic Dachary wrote:
> On 06/18/2012 08:38 AM, Thomas Goirand wrote:
>> On Mon Jun 18 2012 01:06:30 PM CST, Ola Lundqvist <ola at inguza.com> wrote:
>>> The statement in the mail to the development list is wrong.
>>> Install scripts can modify configuration files if it is done
>>> in a safe way preserving local modifications.
>> No! If you intend to modify a configuration file
>> it shouldn't be marked as such, and should be
>> managed by post{inst,rm}.
>>
>>> Due to this I'm closing this bug now.
>> Please reopen it!
>>
> Could you please provide a patch explaining how you would
> resolve this release critical bug ? That will also help
> understand your position. I'm sure Ola will then agree to
> cleanup and integrate the patch that is most agreeable to
> you.
> 
> Thanks in advance for the help :-)

Hi,

It's not agreeable to me, but to the Debian Policy! :)
And frankly, I don't have to explain. There are links to the Debian
policy manual in the original bug report.

The issue is that a maintainer script shouldn't touch a file that is
marked as conffile. One way to fix it that I've used before, is to store
the file as for example:
/usr/share/doc/nova-common/nova.conf.dist

Then we do something like this in the postinst:

if ! [ -f /etc/nova/nova.conf ] ; do
	cp /usr/share/doc/nova-common/nova.conf.dist \
		/etc/nova/nova.conf
fi

Of course, we also have to remove the file in the postinst if the
package is purged.

So we have 2 ways: either we do *not* touch the file at all, and forget
about any debconf stuff to change it, or we do like above. (I'd be for
the above.)

I'll work on a patch and send it to our Git repo on Alioth.

Cheers,

Thomas

P.S: I'm registered to the list, please don't CC me. By the way, since
the list receives the bug reports, do we also need to Cc: the list? IMO,
just sending a mail to the BTS is enough...





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