[Pkg-gpm-devel] Bug#291155: dpkg-reconfigure gpm doesn't work with read-only /usr

[Federico 'Derfel' Stella]

* giovedì 20 gennaio 2005, alle 11:57, Peter Samuelson scrive:
> [Federico 'Derfel' Stella]

>> dpkg-reconfigure gpm doesn't work with read-only /usr:

> Is it expected to?  I see a lot of packages call install-info in their
> postinst scripts - presumably all these would have exactly the same
> bug, yes?  Was this a mass bug filing?
In all my machine /usr is mounter read-only and remounted read-write by
Dpkg::Pre-Invoke in apt.conf. I use this kind of conf by years and I expect
a package to not touch /usr during re-configuration.

This is not a mass bug filling, because I think it's not a widestream
problem, and because I've never encountered this kind of problem with other
packages. Maybe this could be discussed for mass bug filing?

In this machine I have 2414 packages installed and I searched using grep
in all my postinst for dpkg-reconfigure. Results:
Out of 2414 only 10 refers to dpkg-reconfigure:
o bugzilla.postinst
o cupsys.postinst
o gpm.postinst
o libnss-ldap.postinst
o pychecker.postinst
o slapd.postinst
o squid.postinst
o tetex-bin.postinst
o xserver-common.postinst
o xserver-xfree86.postinst
And from this list only gpm.postinst and tetex-bin.postinst referts to
install-info. So this problems seems to affect tetex-bin too.

This search is just to take a quick postinst-tour.

> I guess it's philosophical: whether or not dpkg-reconfigure should skip
> such things as install-info on the theory that this won't normally be
> in need of repair.  There's an argument to be made for that, to be
> sure, but I haven't heard it before.
True, this is the first time I hit this problem.

> Can you point me to an example of a package that changes /usr in its
> postinst but only if not run via dpkg-reconfigure?

After a quick tour I've seen many packages using install-info as you said
and even the code added by dh_installinfo reported below.

All packages using dh_installinfo hit this bug, but I don't think is too
serious, as I don't expect too much from dpkg-reconfigure gdb.

Maybe we should take this conversation to debian-devel?

# Automatically added by dh_installinfo
if [ "$1" = "configure" ]; then
        install-info --quiet --section "Development" "Development" /usr/share/info/stabs.info
fi
# End automatically added section