[Pkg-gpm-devel] Bug#326644: gpm: modifies conffile?

[Justin Pryzby]

# Severity change pending a mutual agreement of the problem.
reopen 326644
thanks

On Tue, Sep 06, 2005 at 06:32:12AM +0300, Guillem Jover wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Sun, Sep 04, 2005 at 02:13:24PM -0400, Justin Pryzby wrote:
> > Package: gpm
> > Severity: serious
> > Version: 1.19.6-21
> > File: /etc/gpm.conf
> > Justification: maintscripts apparently modify conffile (violates: 10.7.3)
> 
> That's wrong. This file is a configuration file, and not a conffile.
Okay, but the effect is the same.  The intent of policy is that
upgrades prompt the user iff:

 - the conffile is modified by the maintainer (a different version is
   shipped in a newer version of a package than in an older version,
   causing the md5sum to change); AND

 - the conffile which was installed by a previous version of the
   package being upgraded was locally modified by the administrator.

If either of the above are false, then no prompting is necessary, and
the upgrade can non-interactively do the expected thing.

Is it true that /etc/gpm.conf used to be a conffile?  I don't
understand any other way that I could be prompted.

Agree, that a transition to debconf+ucf could be nontrivial.  

> Well, even if annoying, we cannot do anything about that, because
> that's due to the transition to debconf + ucf, and we cannot fix and
> get that into sarge anyway. So I'm closing this bug, if you disagree,
> please reopen and lower the severity to normal or similar.
A solution exists for any technical problem.

Have you seen:

  http://www.dpkg.org/ConffileHandling

Based on my understanding of the situation, an old version of GPM had
a conffile, which is now a UCF-handled configuration file, no?  If
this is correct, I propose that GPM should parse any existing
conffile, and determine all the values it sets, and store those values
via debconf.  This should happen in preinst, I think.  Then, in the
configure stage, it should prompt the user for any unset values.  In
postinst, it should use UCF to create a _new_ configuration.

> Although that will be pointless as that will not happen anymore on
> sarge -> etch upgrade, and Debian only supports upgrading from one
> release to the next one.
Huh?  I upgraded to the GPM that migrated to testing ~2 days ago.  So
right now it is a "candidate" version for inclusion into etch; if you
don't release any new version, then this GPM will probably be the one
in etch.

What I would like to see is a GPM update which properly handles this
UCF transition uploaded to unstable, as the new etch "candidate".
Although _I_ will never see the conffile prompt again, everyone else
who updates from a sarge gpm to any ucf-enabled gpm will get the
prompt, which is something to be avoided.  It is an especially big
problem during dist-upgrades, when many packages have similar
problems.  Users shouldn't need to spend massive amounts of time
reading diffs only to discover that they are being unnecessarily
prompted.

Justin