[Pkg-sympa-devel] Bug#689578: sympa: modifies conffiles (policy 10.7.3): /etc/syslog.conf

[Salvatore Bonaccorso]

Hi Andreas

On Thu, Oct 04, 2012 at 11:25:12PM +0200, Salvatore Bonaccorso wrote:
> Hi
> 
> On Thu, Oct 04, 2012 at 10:07:12AM +0200, Andreas Beckmann wrote:
> > Package: sympa
> > Version: 6.1.11~dfsg-4
> > Severity: serious
> > User: debian-qa at lists.debian.org
> > Usertags: piuparts
> > 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > during a test with piuparts I noticed your package modifies conffiles.
> > And even worse, it's a conffile owned by a different package.
> > This is forbidden by the policy, see
> > http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-files.html#s-config-files
> > 
> [..]
> > 
> > debsums reports modification of the following files,
> > from the attached log (scroll to the bottom...):
> > 
> >   /etc/syslog.conf
> 
> I had a look at this bugreport for sympa. This indeed seems to be a
> problem if one uses sysklogd. sysklogd provides
> /usr/sbin/syslog-facility and in sympa's postinst we have:
> 
> ----cut---------cut---------cut---------cut---------cut---------cut-----
> ## Setup a syslog facility
> if which syslog-facility >/dev/null 2>&1 \
>   && [ -e /etc/syslog.conf ] \
>   && ! grep -q "/var/log/sympa.log" /etc/syslog.conf \
>   && syslog-facility set all /var/log/sympa.log > /etc/sympa/facility \
>   && [ -x /etc/init.d/sysklogd ]; then
>         if which invoke-rc.d >/dev/null 2>&1; then
>                 invoke-rc.d sysklogd reload
>         else
>                 etc/init.d/sysklogd reload
>         fi
> fi
> ----cut---------cut---------cut---------cut---------cut---------cut-----
> 
> The problematic call is syslog-facility set all /var/log/sympa.log
> which will add a
> 
> local0.*                /var/log/sympa.log
> 
> to /etc/syslog.conf.

I opened a separate bug against sysklogd about this[1].

 [1]: http://bugs.debian.org/689686

*But* as the cause is mainly the one sysklogd ships both a conffile
/etc/syslog.conf but also a program which allows to modify this, it's
more (only) bug in sysklogd.

Thus sysklogd should not ship /etc/syslog.conf as conffile, but create
it as configuration file and allow to modify it via syslog-facility
utility.

Do you agree on this? If so, we can simply reassign #689578 to
sysklogd and merge with #689686.

Regards,
Salvatore

p.s.: Thanks for your work on all these policy violation bugs.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 836 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-sympa-devel/attachments/20121005/4300a536/attachment.pgp>