[Piuparts-devel] Bug#615034: Bug#615034: Bug#615034: piuparts: New check: detect dangling alternatives

[Holger Levsen]

clone 615034 -1
retitle -1 new test: install with recommends
retitle 615034 new test: emphasize missing bin symlinks
thanks

Hi Paul,

do you need cc:s or are you subscribed?

On Freitag, 25. Februar 2011, Paul Wise wrote:
> Hmm, I guess they are just a subset of dangling symlinks. Feel free to
> close this bug report then and sorry for the noise. Or maybe turn it
> into a check for consistency between /etc/alternatives the
> update-alternatives database in /var/lib/dpkg/alternatives? I'd be
> surprised if it happened but someone might try to manually fiddle
> with /ect/alternatives.

That should be detected as modified files. 

> > About your extented wish to do this for installs with recommends and
> > without, I'd first like to see #604406 fixed and then gain support for
> > libeatmydata, before doing so.
>
> My reason for wanting support for handling recommends was #614716, which
> only shows up without them.

Our discussion made me realize how to turn the missing symlink check into a 
meaningful one: by emphasizing missing symlinks to /usr/bin,/sbin and so on. 
I _believe_ most of the 8000 missing symlinks detected in sid are pointing to 
documentation (and are due to packages recommending their documentation and 
blindly installing the symlinks pointing to it) and frankly I gave up caring 
about those, but I'd like to find the meaningful missing symlinks and file 
bugs about those. 

(like this one in #614716:

pabs at chianamo:~$ ll /usr/bin/spawn-fcgi.lighttpd 
ls: cannot access /usr/bin/spawn-fcgi.lighttpd: No such file or directory

)

> I try not to get involved in QA stuff any more, last time I did it just
> made me depressed.

I try to look at it from a distance and to see the big picture. 401 failed 
piuparts tests in sid at first looks quite bad (and 8608 passed tests with 
missing symlinks, clear policy violations, even more...), but then, a.) it's 
sid, squeeze for a reason ships 2000 packages less, b.) look at the graphs, 
displaying the progress over time (http://piuparts.debian.org/sid/states.png 
and http://piuparts.debian.org/squeeze/states.png) and c.) only very few 
packages in squeeze fail: 27464 out of 28130 in squeeze (amd64 main) passed 
the piuparts tests, thats a great 97,63%. And only 65 failed, thats 0,23%. 
and from the remaining 601 the majority would also pass. So yay. 

And sure, there as whole lot rotten crap out there. But most of the time I 
actually feel good while getting rid off it. Not always though, but thats 
life :)


cheers,
	Holger

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