[Pkg-mailman-hackers] Bug#468569: Bug#468569: no way to escape mailman/queue_files_present

[Marcin Owsiany]

On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 08:01:52PM +0200, Thijs Kinkhorst wrote:
> Hi Marcin,
> 
> On Friday 29 February 2008 17:03, Marcin Owsiany wrote:
> > I am currently preparing an installation of mailman on our system. In
> > order to provide durability of the processed messages, we are going to
> > arrange for /var/lib/mailman to be located on a block-level replicated
> > filesystem.  Thus, if the box crashes, we will just mount the "safe"
> > filesystem on a fresh one and rebuild it (install packages and apply
> > configs).
> >
> > However the current mailman's preinst makes it problematic, as it bombs
> > out if there are any queue files present. My guess is that it should be
> > safe to install the same version of the software as the one which
> > created the queue files? In that case it would really help if there was
> > a way to override this check in some way.
> 
> Yes, this check could be improved (it's now too wide-ranging, at least it's 
> safe but can be very inconvenient). However, the mailman team is currently 
> not very well staffed.
> 
> If you or anyone else experiencing trouble with this can come up with a patch 
> that improves this test's behaviour I'd gladly consider it.

I had a look at the mailman upstream UPGRADE documentation as well as
some bugs and reports on mailing list. My conclusion is that at this
point it won't be safe to allow any upgrades with the queue files in
place. The only safe thing would be precisely my use case: allow exactly
the same version to be installed as the one previously installed.

Obviously this is only useful for reinstalling the same version, or for
disaster recovery, but I still think this is worth including.

I have prepared a patch (attached). Before applying, do a:
svn mv debian/preinst debian/preinst.in

I hated to make the script a preprocessed file, but I could not find any
better way of determining the currently installed version in preinst.

It seems to produce a valid .deb file, although I have not tested
actually installing the package.

-- 
Marcin Owsiany <porridge at debian.org>             http://marcin.owsiany.pl/
GnuPG: 1024D/60F41216  FE67 DA2D 0ACA FC5E 3F75  D6F6 3A0D 8AA0 60F4 1216
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