[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#674460: initscripts: prompting due to modified conffiles which were not modified by the user

[Roger Leigh]

On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 09:50:51PM +0200, Andreas Beckmann wrote:
> during a test with piuparts I noticed your package failed the piuparts
> upgrade test because dpkg detected a conffile as being modified and then
> prompted the user for an action. As there is no user input, this fails.
> But this is not the real problem, the real problem is that this prompt
> shows up in the first place, as there was nobody modifying this conffile
> at all, the package has just been installed and upgraded...
> 
> This is a violation of policy 10.7.3, see
> http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-files.html#s10.7.3,
> which says "[These scripts handling conffiles] must not ask unnecessary
> questions (particularly during upgrades), and must otherwise be good
> citizens."
>   
>   Configuration file `/etc/default/rcS'
> 
> This was observed on a distupgrade from sid to experimental.
> There needs to be a way to detect if /etc/default/rcS is "unmodified"
> (and there are probably a lot of different unmodified variants that
> should allow seamless upgrades) before it's made a conffile.

rcS was previously not a conffile, and was modified by the installer
to set the UTC setting.  In the last few releases, we temporarily
managed it using ucf.  But now the UTC setting is gone (migrated to
/etc/adjtime), there's no reason why it can't be a regular conffile.

If the issue is that we don't detect earlier "unmodified" forms,
we can potentially handle this case with a list of md5sums.
However... given that a number of different scripts edit this
including
- debian-installer clock-setup
- util-linux maintainer scripts
- initscripts maintainer scripts
- potentially others, I'd need to check
the number of combinations is not trivial to deal with, given that
we need every variant/ordering of every rcS version ever provided,
given that the base file is only ever installed once, on initial
installation.

We can look at doing this though.


Regards,
Roger

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