[debian-mysql] Groping for a roadmap in the dark

[Nicholas Bamber]

I think we have made some progress on the piuparts issue.

Firstly it has emerged from the discussion that Debian policy and the
apt/dpkg man pages are wide open to multiple interpretations. In the
case of Debian policy such ambiguity is often deliberate. There is a bug
report #535577 asking for it to be tightened up, but it is fairly clear
that any tightening would be fairly messy. We probably should add our
voices to that.

Secondly there is an apparent contradiction between the thoroughness of
piuparts behaviour and the ambiguity of Debian policy. However I realize
now that that conflict is illusary. piuparts does allow exceptions but
of course by their nature, they must be requested on a case by case
basis. I am not convinced that such an exception is appropriate, though
I am a little less convinced that it is definitely NOT appropriate.

Thirdly postgresql and mysql do things differently and in a fundamental
way. It seems clear to me, that in so far as software should behave
consistently, one of them must be wrong. It is just not clear which one
is wrong - or even that there is a right or wrong answer to that! That
just takes us back to #535577.

Fourthly I have managed to get piuparts working in our context and it
shows some issues. We can run:
piuparts -I 'var/lib/mysql/*' --tmpdir=/home/nicholas/tmp -m
http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ mysql-5.5_5.5.24+dfsg-3_amd64.changes


and we get

4m56.3s ERROR: FAIL: Package purging left files on system:^M
  /etc/mysql     owned by: mysql-common, mysql-server-5.5^M
  /etc/mysql/debian.cnf  not owned^M