Bug#420578: exim4-config killed my email-addresses file

[Josip Rodin]

On Mon, Apr 23, 2007 at 01:43:25PM +0200, Marc Haber wrote:
> > After the upgrade to etch, I found myself generating mails with the wrong
> > headers.
> 
> Which package did you upgrade from?

I can't remember exactly (and I trashed my typescript log too :/),
but I'm pretty sure that it was the 4.50 from sarge, I didn't do any partial
upgrades.

> > % dpkg -s exim4-config | grep email-ad
> >  /etc/email-addresses 6bea09fbb18e4676012105fa5fc726c6
> > % dpkg -L exim4-config | grep exim4/email-addresses                                                                 
> > /etc/exim4/email-addresses
> > 
> > The package is owning the file (symlink) in /etc/exim4, but is not declaring
> > it a conffile.
> > 
> > On sarge, exim4-config did not include /etc/exim4/email-addresses in the
> > package, and there was no bug.
> 
> exim4-config on sarge contains /etc/email-addresses as a conffile, and
> does not contain /etc/exim4/email-addresses.
> 
> exim4-config on etch contains /etc/email-addresses as a conffile, and
> contains /etc/exim4/email-addresses.
> 
> Do I see correctly that you had a local file
> /etc/exim4/email-addresses which was overwritten during the upgrade?

Yes, I had a local file in /etc/exim4/email-addresses, and it got overwritten.

(I originally moved the functionality into the exim4 directory because I
thought it was better suited there, since it was only Exim which understood
it and used it, and it made my exim4.conf clearer since I could use the
CONFDIR macro to address that file, too :)

> If yes, would it fix the issue to manually declare
> /etc/exim4/email-addresses as a conffile?

Manually? How's that? Maybe... belatedly? :)

The way I see it, putting new files into /etc/ and not marking them as
conffiles is a bad idea. The package should mark all of its files in /etc as
conffiles, and prevent these kinds of situations from happening. (Had it
been a conffile, dpkg would have noticed, and it would have prompted me to
check it out.)

I believe there's a Lintian warning to this effect... an error, indeed,
http://lintian.debian.org/reports/Tfile-in-etc-not-marked-as-conffile.html
Yet, it didn't seem to catch it with exim4-config. Perhaps Lintian was
doing a '-f' test where '-e' would have been more appropriate.
You may want to file a bug on it :)

-- 
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