[Pkg-pdns-maintainers] Bug#798773: postinst script handles comments in config file incorrectly

[Christian Hofstaedtler]

Stephen,

* Stephen Frost <sfrost at snowman.net> [151006 04:12]:
> That said, I do think it's worthwhile to see about fixing these
> particular install failures, and the proposed change looks like it would
> at least do that.

I agree that it would make the situation better for some users.

I was going to write which users are affected by this bug, but now
that I think more about it, I'm not sure which users are affected.
As you have some interest, I assume you have run into the bug? How
did your configuration look like?

> > > Is there anything I can do to help?
> > 
> > I'm thinking of deleting most of the code in the postinst for
> > stretch.
> 
> Are you thinking about simply assuming that /etc/powerdns/pdns.d is the
> PDNSDIR ...

Yes, because the files the postinst touches are meant to be the
files that the previous version of the pdns-server package has
shipped.

> and anything else is up to the user to address?

If the user has moved or renamed the pdns.d dir, or changed the
include= dir to point to something else entirely, then we have no
business of touching (and moving!) the users config files at all.

As the postinst doesn't have a version check right now, it
1) is wrong for versions after jessie,
2) we have to look at all previously released binary packages to see
the original intent and which conffiles have previously been installed.
I haven't done that check yet.

> > Not sure what to do about jessie. Given that this bug has existed
> > since 2006, maybe it's not terribly important to fix in jessie.
> 
> I disagree.  Perhaps I'm being naive, but having the relatively simple
> case, where /etc/powerdns/pdns.d is the directory and the configuration
> has been only mildly tweaked, failure during upgrades is not a good
> position for us to be in.
> 
> I have to admit that I'm not up to speed on current policy, but I'm
> happy to try and implement whatever the correct solution is.  I'm sure
> there are other packages which have include directories, is there a
> clear "right way" to handle this?

I don't think there's much policy here except for the normal "don't
touch stuff that isn't yours" - i.e. preserve user changes,
especially if they are to/in files that aren't installed by the
package.

There's some other complication - include= is the old name of the
include directory setting; jessie's pdns does include-dir= instead. [1]

> Thanks!

Thank you for caring about this,
Christian

[1] https://doc.powerdns.com/md/authoritative/settings/#include-dir
-- 
 ,''`.  Christian Hofstaedtler <zeha at debian.org>
: :' :  Debian Developer
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