[Pkg-dia-team] Bug#668446: dia: leaves alternatives after purge

[Andreas Beckmann]

Package: dia,dia-gnome
Version: 0.97.2-7
Severity: important
User: debian-qa at lists.debian.org
Usertags: piuparts

Hi,

during a test with piuparts I noticed your package left unowned files on
the system after purge, which is a violation of policy 6.8:

http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-maintainerscripts.html#s-removedetails

The leftover files are actually alternatives that were installed by the
package but have not been properly removed.

While there is ongoing discussion how to remove alternatives correctly
(see http://bugs.debian.org/71621 for details) the following strategy
should work for regular cases:
* 'postinst configure' always installs the alternative
* 'prerm remove' removes the alternative
* 'postrm remove' and 'postrm disappear' remove the alternative
In all other cases a maintainer script is invoked (e.g. upgrade,
deconfigure) the alternatives are not modified to preserve user
configuration.
Removing the alternative in 'prerm remove' avoids having a dangling link
once the actual file gets removed, but 'prerm remove' is not called in
all cases (e.g. deconfigured or disappearing packages) so the postrm
must remove the alternative again (update-alternatives gracefully
handles removal of non-existing alternatives).

Note that the arguments for adding and removing alternatives differ, for
removal it's 'update-alternatives --remove <name> <path>'.

Filing this as important as having a piuparts clean archive is a release
goal since lenny.

>From the attached log (scroll to the bottom...):

0m37.6s ERROR: WARN: Broken symlinks:
  /usr/bin/dia -> /etc/alternatives/dia
  /etc/alternatives/dia -> /usr/bin/dia-normal-integrated

0m39.4s ERROR: FAIL: Package purging left files on system:
  /etc/alternatives/dia	 not owned
  /usr/bin/dia	 not owned

(and similarly for dia-gnome)


cheers,

Andreas
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