[Pkg-sympa-devel] Bug#639627: sympa: Wrong value for EXPLDIR in Constants.pm

[Roberto Di Cosmo]

Package: sympa
Severity: important


The sympa package in Debian uses the wrong value for EXPLDIR in Constants.pm;
per sympa documentation about virtual hosts, this directory must be the list_data
subdirectory of the sympa data directory, see http://www.sympa.org/manual/virtual-hosts

For the Debian configured package, this would mean

 /var/lib/sympa/list_data

Instead, the Constants.pm file shipped with all versions of the sympa package I could check
contains the line

   use constant EXPLDIR    => '/var/lib/sympa';

This is a significant deviation from the architecture of the file system used in sympa upstream,
and has two major negative effects:
 
 - it renders the official documentation useless: I spent several hours tracking down this 
   issue, and I am sure any other user willing to exploit sympa's virtual hosts facility 
   will have a similar headache;

 - it has potential dangerous consequences: the /var/lib/sympa/list_data must only contain
   virtual host domains, and the sympa code iterates on the files therein; /var/lib/sympa
   contains a lot of other data unrelated to virtual hosts

I would suggest checking carefully where this erroneous configuration comes from (looking
at the sources of the modified Debian sympa I could not find where list_data disappears)

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 6.0.1
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (750, 'testing'), (700, 'stable'), (600, 'unstable'), (550, 'experimental'), (500, 'stable-updates')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.38-1-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) (ignored: LC_ALL set to en_US.utf8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash