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

[Marc Haber]

On Mon, Apr 23, 2007 at 01:51:39PM +0200, Josip Rodin wrote:
> 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.

Ok, I can reproduce this behavior now.

> > 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.

Then I understand now what is going on here. This information was not
too clear in the original report.

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

by putting it into exim4-config.conffiles?

> The way I see it, putting new files into /etc/ and not marking them as
> conffiles is a bad idea.

Definetely.

>  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.)

Absolutely. However, we used to rely on debhelper doing so
automatically, but it does not seem to do this for symlinks. Which
caused the situation here (#421346).

But, manually putting /etc/exim4/email-addresses into
debian/exim4-config.conffiles doesn't help as well as the resulting
package does not install (#421344).

> 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 :)

#421345.

Greetings
Marc

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