Bug#380233: [pkg-ntp-maintainers] Bug#380233: package transition leaves a mess of old ntp-server and ntp-simple stuff, including dangerous purge possibilities

[Peter Eisentraut]

Max Bowsher wrote:
> Upgrading to the 4.2.2 ntp packages, which merge the ntp-server and
> ntp-simple packages into the ntp package leaves the old packages in
> the 'config-files' state.  In particular, this leaves active cron
> scripts under the name 'ntp-server', which are then duplicated by the
> new 'ntp' scripts. This may lead to weird unintentional behaviours as
> various lag rotation jobs are run twice, once by the old, once by the
> new scripts.

My thought on the cron jobs is that we're going to remove them in the 
new package, because logging goes to syslog by default, and there 
doesn't seem to be a good reason not to use that anyway, plus we have 
requests to use logrotate, which would be a better alternative if we 
needed it, which we don't.

The init script might be a bit of an issue because you might have two 
init scripts trying to start the same program, but there are interlocks 
that should prevent that.

Other than that, I don't see a problem with leaving the configuration 
files lying around.

> Additionally, if an incautious sysadmin was to purge the old
> packages, then the old ntp-simple postinst script will cause serious
> damage to the existing ntp installation, in particular, deleting the
> 'ntp' user, as well as deleting the /var/lib/ntp/ and
> /var/log/ntpstats/ directories.

My answer to that is that you shouldn't randomly purge packages at 
random times.  We could, however, try to document a sequence of steps 
to clean up your system after an upgrade.  Basically, if you restart 
ntp after you purge ntp-server, you should be fine.

The ntp-simple and ntp-refclock packages can be safely removed at any 
time I believe.