Bug#545512: cyrus-common-2.2: unnecessarily runs cyrus-makedirs on all upgrades

[Ross Boylan]

On Tue, 2009-09-08 at 09:55 +0200, Sven Mueller wrote:
> Ross Boylan schrieb:
> > On Mon, 2009-09-07 at 13:13 -0400, Noah Meyerhans wrote:
> >> Package: cyrus-common-2.2
> >> Version: 2.2.13-10+etch2
> >> Severity: normal
> >>
> >> cyrus-common-2.2.postinst runs cyrus-makedirs on all package updates,
> >> even when it's not necessary.  In the case of the recent security update
> > This is the same as bug 404446, which was marked as fixed.  I can
> > confirm that it is not fixed; I thought I had done something to try to
> > keep the old bug open, but it seems not.
> 
> Well, it was not exactly fixed when the changelog says it was:
> What was done back then is that the old recursive chown/chmod was
> replaced by a "find", which already greatly improved performance of
> makedirs. Later changes replaced the "find --exec" with "find --print0|
> xargs -0" which improved performance even more.
> 
> However, I just changed the relevant postinst script so that it only
> runs cyrus-makedirs on fresh installs and when the new version is a
> different upstream version then the package that is upgraded. I'm not
> comfortable with running it more seldom than that.
> 
It looks as if even a minor version bump (2.3.13->2.3.14) is sufficient
to cause the script to reexecute.  What potential problem is this
defending against?  Cyrus is supposed to be a closed server; it seems to
me as if only some deliberate administrator intervention could cause
things to go wrong.

On my system the operation takes about an hour, so I'm quite eager to
avoid it.

Thank you for working not only on this problem but on a lot of
others--you've been busy!

Ross