[Pkg-octave-devel] postinstall may fail when /usr/local/bin/octave exists

[Sébastien Villemot]

On Tue, Aug 22, 2017 at 01:48:47PM -0700, Mike Miller wrote:

> One thing that I have seen a lot of in Ubuntu, but not so much in
> Debian, is a postinstall failure when the user has built and installed
> octave under /usr/local, then later tries to upgrade or install octave
> from the archive.
> 
> By default, /usr/local/bin precedes /bin and /usr/bin in root's PATH, so
> octave's postinstall will end up running /usr/local/bin/octave.
> 
> In the typical scenario, postinstall fails with
> 
>   error: couldn't read directory /usr/local/share/octave/packages: No such file or directory
> 
> and the package is left unconfigured. Users are told to delete
> /usr/local/bin/octave and run apt-get -f install, problem solved.
> 
> In a slightly more subtle case, I could imagine this silently
> succeeding, but with the wrong instance of Octave, leaving all
> apt-installed octave-foo packages unavailable when a user later runs
> /usr/bin/octave.
> 
> I know typically it is preferable to call commands by name and let PATH
> do its job, but in this case, where we want to build the package cache
> for a specific instance of Octave, maybe we should call /usr/bin/octave
> explicitly?

Thanks for raising this issue. Indeed, I think that we should call
/usr/bin/octave from maintainer scripts (maybe leaving a comment reminding us
why the /usr/bin/ part is needed).

-- 
⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀  Sébastien Villemot
⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁  Debian Developer
⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀  http://sebastien.villemot.name
⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀  http://www.debian.org
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-octave-devel/attachments/20170822/81a67a5c/attachment.sig>