[Pkg-systemd-maintainers] Bug#619244: systemd: unowned files after purge (policy 6.8, 10.8): /etc/machine-id

[Michael Stapelberg]

control: block -1 by 745876

Hi Simon,

Simon McVittie <smcv at debian.org> writes:
> On Wed, 16 Apr 2014 at 07:41:43 +0200, Tobias Frost wrote:
>> I hacked something together for discussion: 
>> In postinst, lets check for /etc/machine-id validity, and if it is valid
>> copy it to /var/lib/dbus/machine-id. (I prefered cp instead over links
>> to avoid dangling links if e.g systemd is purged; Just deleting won't
>> work either as there are some programs with hard-coded paths to dbus' id
>> without fallback to systemd's)  
>> 
>> However, I'm unsure if this needs to be handled: If dbus is updated and
>> the both machine-ids are different, dbus's machine-id-file will change
>> at runtime, which could cause problems according dbus-uuidgen(1). 
>
> If the two files are already different, the damage has already been done;
> I don't think we should make it worse by unilaterally changing one of them.
>
> What I had in mind was more like: change dbus-uuidgen so if /etc/machine-id
> exists but /var/lib/dbus/machine-id doesn't, it copies /etc/machine-id
> instead of creating a new thing. I've put patches on an upstream bug
> for review: <https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77941>
Thanks for that.

In the meantime, we decided to send a patch to base-files and create
/etc/machine-id in there. See http://bugs.debian.org/745876

-- 
Best regards,
Michael