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

[( Marc A. Lehmann )]

On Tue, Jan 25, 2005 at 07:42:20PM +0100, Marc Haber <mh+debian-packages@zugschlus.de> wrote:
> 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

Reason? It's not your mail that has been lost, and the bug certainly
causes non-restorable data loss.

> > 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.
> 
> side. Since you surely won't update a productive system without
> monitoring your logs after the upgrade

Thanks that you know what we do. Unfortunately, logs didn't show anything
bad as exim4 started fine and the system didn't receive mail for some
time.  Assuming that I sit around and wait for bad things to happen that
are caused by debian package breakage is fine for you, but doesn't change
the data loss nature of this bug.

> 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.

This has not happened, presumably because within the 24 hours that this
happened, the other mail already stopped retrying.

If you think that losing mails is not serious data loss, speak up please.
Otherwise please acknowledge that this bug causes the problem to happen.

> > 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.

A bug that caused data loss.

> 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?

For me, yes, but for others probably not. This is a bug and it should be
fixed properly. If users cannot edit the exim4 confgi file then it must go
out of /etc.

-- 
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