Bug#952534: debsums: conffiles not removed: /etc/debsums-ignore

[Axel Beckert]

Control: tag -1 + moreinfo
Control: retitle -1 debsums: /etc/debsums-ignore listed as "obsolete conffile" despite having been removed

Hi Pabs,

Paul Wise wrote:
> The recent upgrade did not deal with obsolete conffiles properly.

I see that "dpkg-query -W -f='${Conffiles}\n' debsums | fgrep
obsolete" lists /etc/debsums-ignore. It's though unclear to me, why.

It's no more listed in debsums/DEBIAN/conffiles and it has been
removed on disk as it was untouched locally.

> Please use the dpkg-maintscript-helper support provided by
> dh_installdeb to remove these obsolete conffiles on upgrade.

Definitely not. If you look at the git history, that's exactly what I
tried before releasing 2.2.5 — and it did not work as needed for this
specific case (i.e. keeping the file as it is if modified and _not_
renaming it to /etc/debsums-ignore.bak as rm_conffile unconditionally
does):

https://salsa.debian.org/perl-team/modules/packages/debsums/-/merge_requests/1#note_143734
https://salsa.debian.org/perl-team/modules/packages/debsums/-/commit/ffc47c668c84435713caf580e44d07cda53fd404
https://salsa.debian.org/perl-team/modules/packages/debsums/-/commit/718bb9e32ae7488c05cbb0403c6ead5f741d434f

> Removing empty /etc/debsums-ignore, a non-existing /etc/debsums-ignore
> now has the same semantics.
[...]
> $ find /etc/debsums-ignore
> find: ‘/etc/debsums-ignore’: No such file or directory

That worked as expected.

I've just read through
https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ap-pkg-conffiles.html

It sounds as if I should not have removed the file in the maintainer
script, but just having left it alone — especially without using
rm_conffile.

Do you know if that would have resulted in the wanted behaviour (our
wanted behaviour, not the one rm_conffile does, see above)?

P.S.: The subject is wrong (or at least confusing) since the conffile
actually has been removed, just not the record of it being a conffile.

		Regards, Axel
-- 
 ,''`.  |  Axel Beckert <abe at debian.org>, https://people.debian.org/~abe/
: :' :  |  Debian Developer, ftp.ch.debian.org Admin
`. `'   |  4096R: 2517 B724 C5F6 CA99 5329  6E61 2FF9 CD59 6126 16B5
  `-    |  1024D: F067 EA27 26B9 C3FC 1486  202E C09E 1D89 9593 0EDE