[Pkg-nagios-devel] Bug#699744: nagios3-cgi: prompting due to modified conffiles which were not modified by the user: /etc/nagios3/stylesheets/outages.css

[Guillem Jover]

Hi!

On Wed, 2013-02-06 at 00:50:29 +0100, Andreas Beckmann wrote:
> On Tuesday, 5. February 2013 01:01:43 Vagrant Cascadian wrote:
> > As far as I can tell, /etc/nagios3/stylesheets/* were introduced in the
> > squeeze nagios3-cgi package. /etc/nagios3/cgi.cfg was a conffile with
> > nagios3-common in wheezy, and transitioned to nagios3-cgi for wheezy. My
> > guess is something wrong in the transition from nagios3-common to
> > nagios3-cgi for cgi.cfg, but I'm not sure what exactly is needed there.

> OK. I see what happened here. Not nagios3's fault.
> Bug #689836: dpkg: md5sums incorrectly recorded for conffile takeover
> http://bugs.debian.org/689836
> 
> So it's broken in squeeze (dpkg database is corrupted, i.e. contains the wrong 
> md5sums (well, it contains the correct md5sums, too, but at the wrong 
> place)). Whether this happens depends on the configuration order. If 
> nagios-doc is configured before nagios3-cgi it will record the new md5sum for 
> updated conffiles for nagios3-doc instead of nagios-cgi ... even if it no 
> longer owns these files.
> 
> I have no idea how many packages are possibly affected by this or how this can 
> be fixed ... therefore Cc:ing Guillem.

TBH I'm not sure how many can be affected, my guess would be not many
though.

> Wait, we can try this:
> 
> # apt-get install --reinstall nagios3-cgi
> # dpkg -s nagios3-cgi
[...]
> 
> Great, that FIXED the DB.

Right, it should just be either a matter of time, once every problematic
package has been upgraded after getting a fixed dpkg, or people actively
reinstalling broken packages. In any case, for wheezy I guess it would
be nice to strongly recommend on the release notes to upgrade dpkg first.

I also had in mind checking with the SRM if the fix for the above dpkg
bug would be fine for a stable update, among some others, but only
after having those in unstable and testing for a long while. But that
will still not guarantee that people have upgraded to that stable dpkg
version before the wheezy dist-upgrade, so...

Thanks,
Guillem