Bug#476242: Upgrades from Etch make fonts disappear

[Damyan Ivanov]

Package: libpdf-api2-perl
Version: 0.66-1
Severity: serious

Hi,

Today my PDF::API2-using application started to die due to missing
fonts. Looking closer, it appeared that /usr/share/perl5/PDF/API2/fonts/
is an empty directory, instead of a symlink to
/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-dejavu.

The package does not ship DejaVu fonts since version 0.66-1, replacing
fonts/ directory with a symlink. However, when upgrading, dpkg won't
replace directories with symlinks, leaving an empty fonts/ directory.

This would break applications that were running fine on Etch.

Quoting Policy §6.6.4:
    A directory will never be replaced by a symbolic link to a directory
    or vice versa; instead, the existing state (symlink or not) will be
    left alone and dpkg will follow the symlink if there is one.

To fix this, .postinst should be added, detecting an empty fonts/
directory and replacing it with a symlink. It would be nice if .prerm
detects downgrades to versions << 0.66-1 and replaces back the symlink
with an empty directory.

See also http://bugs.debian.org/468111


-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers oldstable
  APT policy: (500, 'oldstable'), (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.24-1-686 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=bg_BG.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=bg_BG.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages libpdf-api2-perl depends on:
ii  libcompress-zlib-perl         2.008-2    Perl module for creation and manip
ii  perl                          5.8.8-12   Larry Wall's Practical Extraction 
ii  ttf-dejavu                    2.24-2     Metapackage to pull in ttf-dejavu-

libpdf-api2-perl recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information