[Aptitude-devel] Bug#718341: Bug#71834{1, 2}: aptitude install cups-daemon doesn't create 'cupsd.conf' file

[Axel Beckert]

Control: forcemerge 718341 718342
Control: reassign 718341 cups-daemon
Control: tag 718341 + moreinfo

Hi Jeffrey,

JGThomas wrote:
> Due to the pain of CUPS, I needed to reinstall my printers and that
> started with purging CUPS and reinstalling those related packages.

Did you only purge cups-daemon or also all of the also removed
dependencies like e.g. cups-common. By default (and as documented)
neither aptitude nor apt-get purge removed dependencies, too.

At least in Squeeze, cupsd.conf was part of cups-common. And if you
deleted cupsd.conf, then purged cups, but not cups-common, cupsd.conf
won't be recreated on purpose, because it obviously had been deleted
by the administrator on purpose.

See --purge-unused in aptitude's man page for how to configure to also
purge all removed dependencies in case of purging a package. But be
aware: This is a dangerous mode of operation as it can cause data loss
(some packages may also remove data generated by them on purge) and
not the default on purpose.

I suspect that the case in Wheezy and later is similar as there is
_no_ cupsd.conf in any package in neither Wheezy nor Sid nor Jessie.

cups (in Wheezy, cups-daemon in Jessie and Sid) only contains
/etc/cups/cupsd.conf.default which suggests that cupsd.conf is
generated at install time. I though haven't investigated that further.
I'm sure the cups package maintainer knows better and by mind how that
works with the cups-daemon package.

> I backed up the /etc/cups/ folder and ran 'aptitude purge
> cups-daemon', and then tired to install with 'aptitude install cups
> cups-daemon cups-client cups-server-common hplip-cups cups-common'.
> DPKG wasn't able to configure CUPS due to a missing cupsd.conf file
> (which is in the package that aptitude was installing, so it should
> not be missing).

It's not that simple. As explained above, purging just one package
likely does not suffice as it definitely didn't suffice in the past.

> Aptitude should have unpacked the file contents as expected and as
> I've experienced in the past.  The inability of a package manager to
> install necessary files seems like the tool isn't doing its job
> correctly.

No. This issue is very likely not a package manager issue (if it is
one at all). I'm therefore reassigning the issue to cups-daemon.

Nevertheless I'm not sure if it's really a bug as it seems as if not
all necessary packages have been purged before reinstallation.

It though may be a missing feature in the general package format (i.e.
dpkg) as there's currently no way for packages to declare that in case
of purging, a list of its dependencies need to be purged, too, or
similar. If such a feature would be really helpful is another
discussion.

> -- System Information:
> Debian Release: 7.0
>   APT prefers unstable
>   APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (1, 'experimental')

JFTR: This doesn't fit: 7.0 is Wheezy/Stable.

> Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)

This also looks more like Wheezy.

Since it's unclear which distribution your're running (or rather which
packages are uptodate as some doesn't seem to be uptodate), please
mention which versions of cups-daemon, cups-client,
cups-server-common, hplip-cups and cups-common you were trying to
reinstall, otherwise the cups maintainer can't really decide which
package versions may be affected (if at all).

		Regards, Axel
-- 
 ,''`.  |  Axel Beckert <abe at debian.org>, http://people.debian.org/~abe/
: :' :  |  Debian Developer, ftp.ch.debian.org Admin
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