[pkg-apparmor] Bug#883682: don't install features-file as conffile for easier overriding

intrigeri intrigeri at debian.org
Fri Dec 8 17:42:53 UTC 2017


Hi,

Laurent Bigonville:
> if a policy creator wants to modify the policy he might need to modify this
> file as well same if a user is building his own kernel.

There's really no good reason why one would need to modify the default
file in /usr: the features-file that the parser uses is configured in
/etc/apparmor/parser.conf so if one wants to use a different one, they
can point to their own features-file (stored wherever they want)
instead of the default one.

> There seems to have no override mechanism here that meas that if
> anybody has modified the features file now that you move that file
> to /usr it means that the changes will completely be ignored

Right. Now, that file has been there (in testing/sid only) for less
than 1.5 months so I doubt there's anyone who does advanced enough
AppArmor things to modify that file but does not follow our discussion
channels and would therefore be surprised by this move.
I've considered documenting this in NEWS.Debian but decided against
spamming everyone only to better support a use case I believe does not
exist (and really, anyone doing this kind of advanced AppArmor things
on testing/sid has all the skills needed to recover from the breakage
in the unlikely event that any happened).

> (leading to possible boot failures).

I'm not concerned about it. I doubt we ship any policy that can break
the boot if loaded under an unexpected feature set but I did not
check. FWIW in the years I've been using AppArmor on dozens of
systems, I've never seen it break my boot, and I can't recall any such
bug report in Debian so far. I guess that's an advantage that comes
with our current tiny AppArmor policy coverage (that you've pointed
out elsewhere).

Thanks for the feedback!



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