[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#739575: python-pysam-tests: world writable directory tree: /var/lib/pysam/tests

[Andreas Tille]

On Thu, Feb 20, 2014 at 11:47:51AM +0100, Andreas Beckmann wrote:
> On 2014-02-20 10:08, Andreas Tille wrote:
> > Hi Andreas,
> > 
> > the directory is intended to be written by the world since the whole
> > world should be able to run the test suite there ... this is the purpose
> > of this package at all:  Let everybody run the test (including
> > autopkgtest) and forget about the directory afterwards.
> 
> This works for $everybody. But $everybody+1 finds only the leftovers
> from his predecessor there (or nothing if he cleaned up "properly").

Yes, this might happen.  The main purpose of this package to provide
some larger chunks of data in a convinient way to run autopkgtest.  This
could for sure be approached by providing (compressed) files in a
readonly dir, uncompress them to `mktemp -d` and run the tests there.
However, I do simply see no reason to put this extra effort onto the
test running machines.

If human testers might test manually and somebody else has changed the
files for whatever reason - hey, the test will fail in the worst case.
That's a pity but I see no practical problem since in real life cases
people have their reason to play with the stuff and know about the
consequences.

> > Do I need to mark this intention to not provoke any errors?
> 
> If you convince me, I can add exceptions. But I need to dig into this
> further.
> 
> Users are allowed to modify/delete the python scripts in that directory?
> What is the expected bahavior on package updates and modified .sam files
> there?

If a new upstream release is issued the files should be overriden by the
content of the new test suite.  Everything of the current world writable
dir can go to the dustbin.

Kind regards

        Andreas.

-- 
http://fam-tille.de