Bug#802696: petsc: Wrong permissions on /var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/petsc

[Torquil Macdonald Sørensen]

Source: petsc
Version: 3.6.2.dfsg1-2
Severity: important

The file /var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/petsc is not readable by a non-root user,
thereby causing update-alternatives to fail:

$ ls -l /var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/petsc
-rw------- 1 root root 1792 Oct 22 18:28 /var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/petsc

$ update-alternatives --display petsc
update-alternatives: error: unable to open file '/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/petsc': Permission denied

and even the following command not related to petsc fails because of this:

$ update-alternatives --get-selections
update-alternatives: error: unable to open file '/var/lib/dpkg/alternatives/petsc': Permission denied

Best regards
Torquil Macdonald Sørensen

-- System Information:
Debian Release: stretch/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (990, 'unstable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 4.2.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)