Debian Bug report logs - #397785
lintian: Warn if a postinst script doesn't understand reconfigure

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Message #5 received at [email protected] (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Frank Küster <[email protected]>

To: Debian Bug Tracking System <[email protected]>

Subject: [debconf] Should warn if postinst doesn't understand argument "reconfigure"

Date: Thu, 09 Nov 2006 14:57:28 +0100

Package: lintian
Version: 1.5.8
Severity: wishlist

From debconf-devel(7):

,----
| the right thing would be to pass $1 = "reconfigure", but doing so
| without breaking all the postinsts that use debconf is difficult.  The
| migration plan away from this hack is to encourage people to write
| postinsts that accept "reconfigure", and once they all do, begin
| passing that variable.
`----

To aid in that goal, it would be nice if lintian complained if
reconfigure is not accepted.

Regards, Frank

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (99, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.17-2-686
Locale: LANG=de_DE@euro, LC_CTYPE=de_DE@euro (charmap=ISO-8859-15)

Versions of packages debconf depends on:
ii  debconf-i18n               1.4.30.13     full internationalization support 
ii  perl-base                  5.8.4-8sarge5 The Pathologically Eclectic Rubbis

-- debconf information:
* debconf/priority: medium
* debconf/frontend: Kde

-- 
Dr. Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)

Message #10 received at [email protected] (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Russ Allbery <[email protected]>

To: Frank Küster <[email protected]>

Cc: [email protected]

Subject: Re: Bug#397785: [debconf] Should warn if postinst doesn't understand argument "reconfigure"

Date: Thu, 09 Nov 2006 11:54:15 -0800

Frank Küster <[email protected]> writes:

> Package: lintian
> Version: 1.5.8
> Severity: wishlist

> From debconf-devel(7):

> ,----
> | the right thing would be to pass $1 = "reconfigure", but doing so
> | without breaking all the postinsts that use debconf is difficult.  The
> | migration plan away from this hack is to encourage people to write
> | postinsts that accept "reconfigure", and once they all do, begin
> | passing that variable.
> `----

> To aid in that goal, it would be nice if lintian complained if
> reconfigure is not accepted.

Agreed, but I don't have any idea how to do that given that the tests in
postinst can be written as case statements or if statements and in many
different formats and syntaxes and simply missing the word "reconfigure"
doesn't mean that the postinst is wrong.

-- 
Russ Allbery ([email protected])               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

Message #15 received at [email protected] (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Frank Küster <[email protected]>

To: Russ Allbery <[email protected]>

Cc: [email protected]

Subject: Re: Bug#397785: [debconf] Should warn if postinst doesn't understand argument "reconfigure"

Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2006 07:59:45 +0100

Russ Allbery <[email protected]> wrote:

> Frank Küster <[email protected]> writes:
>
>> Package: lintian
>> Version: 1.5.8
>> Severity: wishlist
>
>> From debconf-devel(7):
>
>> ,----
>> | the right thing would be to pass $1 = "reconfigure", but doing so
>> | without breaking all the postinsts that use debconf is difficult.  The
>> | migration plan away from this hack is to encourage people to write
>> | postinsts that accept "reconfigure", and once they all do, begin
>> | passing that variable.
>> `----
>
>> To aid in that goal, it would be nice if lintian complained if
>> reconfigure is not accepted.
>
> Agreed, but I don't have any idea how to do that given that the tests in
> postinst can be written as case statements or if statements and in many
> different formats and syntaxes and simply missing the word "reconfigure"
> doesn't mean that the postinst is wrong.

Yes, this is hard and probably won't go without false positives and
negatives... 

One approach might be to

- find assignments of $1 to a variable name

- check all occurrences of 

case ['"]*\$(1|name_found)['"] 

  or analogous 

if (\[|test) ...

  whether there's an occurence of "reconfigure" before "esac" or before
  "then", respectively.  I'd say it's a feature not to allow
  "*configure" in case statements.

Even if this approach might give false positives, I still think it's
better to do such a check than none at all.  

Regards, Frank
-- 
Dr. Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)

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