Bug#292191: upgrade changes ownerhsip of /var/spool/exim4

[Marc Haber]

severity #292191 normal
thanks

On Tue, Jan 25, 2005 at 05:30:53PM +0100, Marc Lehmann wrote:
> Package: exim4
> Version: 4.43-4
> Severity: critical
> Justification: causes serious data loss

NACK

> I tagged this report as critical because the problem has caused mail to be
> lost in the past and would likely result in lost mail in the future.

It has caused mail to be not accepted and to be queued on the sending
side. Since you surely won't update a productive system without
monitoring your logs after the upgrade, worst thing that's going to
happen is that you won't accept new messages for an hour and having
them re-delivered by the remote side some time later.

> On every upgrade of the exim4 package, on any of our machines,
> /var/spool/exim4 is being chown'ed to Debian-exim4, which causes the spool
> files to become inaccessible to exim and causes it not to accept new mail.
> 
> The correct user to chown to would be 8:8, as this is what our
> exim4-config specifies.
> 
> This has been corrected manually a number of times, but it happens
> everytime that the exim4 package gets upgraded, and a manual chown is
> often forgotten.

The postinst chowns all files belonging to user mail to Debian-exim to
support updates from older versions of the exim4 packages.

Would it be OK for you to manually add a mode override (using
dpkg-statoverride) and have future versions of the exim4 packages
refrain from chowning the files if a manual override can be detected?

Greetings
Marc

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Marc Haber         | "I don't trust Computers. They | Mailadresse im Header
Mannheim, Germany  |  lose things."    Winona Ryder | Fon: *49 621 72739834
Nordisch by Nature |  How to make an American Quilt | Fax: *49 621 72739835