[Pkg-freevo-maint] Bug#607921: retitle 607921: freevo messes with /home

[Holger Levsen]

retitle 607921: freevo messes with /home
clone 607921 -1 
severity -1 important
retitle -1 freevo: doesnt cleanup on purge
thanks

Hi,

On Freitag, 24. Dezember 2010, A Mennucc wrote:
> tag 607921 +wontfix

sigh. 

But tagging it "wontfix" will not prevent the release manager to remove your 
package from squeeze. Your call...

You seem to have misunderstood that this bug is mostly about not purging on 
purge. Thats just a side effect / another problem. The real problem is that 
your package is directly messing with /home/freevo - thats the NO GO.

To help you, I've now made two bugs out of this one ;-)

> here is the situation. When you install the package 'freevo' it sets up
> your PC to be a PVR.

Thanks, I know freevo, I have used it in the past.

> Then users (*)  can
> indeed record TV shows in the directory /home/freevo/recordings . 

Users can do what they want with their system. Debian packages OTOH are 
supposed to follow Debian policy and therefore FHS. And the FHS says: "dont 
touch /home".

Simple as that.

> So I 
> do not find it reasonable to delete these directories when the 'freevo'
> package is purged.
[...]
> If 'freevo' would delete these 
> directories when I purge it, then I would be very unhappy by now.

Why would you purge freevo, if you dont want all its files to go away?
Seriously.

IMO purge should always do what purge is supposed to do. 

Keeping configuration / data on purge is stupid, because
 a.) thats what "remove does"
 b.) thats not what "purge" should do. I hate it when a computer doesnt do as 
I say...
 b.) if one cannot rely on "purge" to really purge, because too many packages 
want to be exceptions, "purge" becomes useless.
 c.) you do have backups, anyway, don't you?

> If another user is using freevo as I do, and he would for any reason
> decide to purge 'freevo' and it would delete these directories then the
> user would come to my place with a very large and spiky clue-bat.

to which you could say "you asked the package to be purged, not removed, and 
the packaging system did that." PEBKAC.

> Do you agree with the above?

No. (And I'm rather sick of explaining people that Debian policy also applies 
to their packages, esp. if I give good URLs to read.)

> As per the choice of directories... does it make any major difference
> whether they are under /home or under /var or anywhere alse ?

Sigh.

Yes it does. 

> BTW, what 'freevo' is doing is similar to what mysql does: by default,
> mysql-server-5.0 will not delete the databases on package purge (unless
> the user uses debconf to set the key postrm_remove_databases to true)

I'd be happier if freevo would also support this. IMO this would still be a 
bug, but probably not an important one ;)


But please keep in mind, that using /home per default is the serious problem 
you need to fix. 
And please read the URLs I gave you in the initial bug report.


cheers,
	Holger
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