[Piuparts-devel] Bug#458921: Bug#458921: piuparts: should provide a summary of the test

[Holger Levsen]

Hi Christoph,

On Freitag, 16. Mai 2014, Christoph Biedl wrote:
> I was about to file a bug report titled "piuparts logs a completely
> un-understandable for the casual user" (after settling the tone a
> bit), but it seems I could as well amend to this one.

:-) Appreciated!
 
> Thing is, I had my first contact with piuparts where something like
> 
> the following was reported:
> | ERROR: FAIL: Package purging left files on system:
> |  /var/lib/<package>/      not owned
> 
> And that's it.

Our templates suggest to append the full log as well, something like 
https://piuparts.debian.org/sid/fail/debian-security-support_2014.05.16.log

And at the top of this log it says:

0m0.0s INFO: 
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
0m0.0s INFO: To quickly glance what went wrong, scroll down to the bottom of 
this logfile.
0m0.0s INFO: FAQ available at http://wiki.debian.org/piuparts/FAQ
0m0.0s INFO: The FAQ also explains how to contact us in case you think 
piuparts is wrong.
0m0.0s INFO: 
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

as well as

0m0.0s INFO: Command line arguments: /srv/piuparts.debian.org/sbin/piuparts --
skip-logrotatefiles-test --warn-on-others --scriptsdir /etc/piuparts/scripts 
--no-eatmydata --allow-database --scriptsdir /etc/piuparts/scripts-leftovers 
--mirror 'http://mirror.bm.debian.org/debian/ main' --tmpdir 
/srv/piuparts.debian.org/tmp --arch amd64 -b 
/srv/piuparts.debian.org/slave/basetgz/sid_amd64.tar.gz -d sid --no-upgrade-
test --apt debian-security-support=2014.05.16

as a hint how to rather easily reproduce a test.

> So the questions are: Why is that an error? 

Because we expect packages to "be good citizens" and that includes cleaning up 
after oneself. (=be clean on purge)

> Where can I learn more
> about it?

Debian policy, developers reference and new maintainers guide.

> And: What's the appropriate fix? 

Remove this directory. (/var/lib/debian-security-support/	 in the above case.)

> These questions must have
> been asked before several times. Please do the little effort so any
> pre-existing answers can be found easily.

Indeed, there have been several hundreds of bugs been filed about not cleaning 
up after purge. And several hundred of them have been fixed.

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?tag=piuparts;users=debian-
qa at lists.debian.org&archive=both shows you the list and that link is on every 
html page on piuparts.debian.org. (The link is called "bugs filed".)

> Snooping around by searching for "piuparts not owned" I found older
> bug reports that refer to policy 6.8 and 10.8. The latter refers to
> logfiles which is not the case here. The first one doesn't mention
> this kind to state files. So it might be an interpretation of the
> policy, result of a longer discussion. I am willing to follow but not
> unless I understood what's going on here.

"being a good citizen" is not really spelled out well, IIRC. It's the same as 
"a package shall^wmust install cleanly" even though this is also not in policy 
nor developers reference. But the release team has definied this criteria.

Oh, and this mass bug filing ("fails to clean on purge") was also discussed on 
debian-devel at l.d.o, as it should be: read Message-Id: 
<200910192014.18893.holger at layer-acht.org> and follow ups. Granted it was 5 
years ago, but some types of bugs hardly die.

(And if you only want to read one reply to this mail I'd like to point out 
Message-ID: <20091020114207.GA17855 at usha.takhisis.invalid> which just made me 
rethink whether those bugs by now should maybe become upgraded to serious, as 
we indeed break our quality promise by still and again and again accepting 
known dirty packages in testing+stable.)

> So, please don't leave maintainers puzzled in the dark.  In comparison,
> the lintian checker does a good job by providing explanative output
> through an option, and also web pages for each message. For piuparts,
> I was already glad if the error message contained a pointer to a
> longer text for those who don't understand that short text but are
> willing to learn.

as stated in the beginning: I'm unsure where you've gotten such a brief report 
from.


cheers,
	Holger
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