Debian Bug report logs - #398658
lintian: Detect unconditional use of non-essential packages during purge

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

From: Justin Pryzby <[email protected]>

To: [email protected]

Subject: lintian: Please detect unconditional use of some nonessential pkgs during purge

Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2006 15:35:19 -0500

Package: lintian
Severity: wishlist

On Tue, Nov 14, 2006 at 03:13:42PM -0500, Justin Pryzby wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 14, 2006 at 08:07:27PM +0100, Frank Lichtenheld wrote:
> > On Tue, Nov 14, 2006 at 06:44:38PM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> > > Here is a list of packages that fail when all packages except essential
> > > ones, apt and debfoster wxhere removed, but didn't fail when all
> > > important&required packages were kept. This indicates a missing
> > > dependency on an important or required package, and is considered an RC bug.
> > > Packages from the list above were removed from that list, so all of them
> > > should be RC bugs (pending confirmation from the release team, of course).
> > 
> > Here some preliminary investigation of these to give a better feel
> > for the reasons behind the failures.
> 
> The package needs to check for the existence of the dependency before making
> use of it, right?
Please detect the unconditional use of debconf, adduser, update-inetd, etc
inside "purge" conditional or case, or at the top of a script, before
conditionals or cases.  

> This is at least true for the "debconf" errors; since "debconf is a cache", it
> isn't useful to fail when the cache has already been removed.  I guess this is
> why some packages use:

Please also detect this:
> 
>    . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule || true

> They should really use 
> 
>    f=/usr/share/debconf/confmodule
>    [ ! -e $f ] || . $f;

> For the "adduser" errors, it might be reasonable to intentionally fail, as a
> mechanism to alert the admin that "the user hasn't and can't be removed".  Same
> for update-inetd.  Is that the intent?

> Justin

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

From: Russ Allbery <[email protected]>

To: [email protected], [email protected]

Subject: Re: Bug#398658: lintian: Please detect unconditional use of some nonessential pkgs during purge

Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2006 18:18:16 -0800

Justin Pryzby <[email protected]> writes:

> Please detect the unconditional use of debconf, adduser, update-inetd,
> etc inside "purge" conditional or case, or at the top of a script,
> before conditionals or cases.

"etc." is going to be read as if it wasn't present unless someone spells
it out for me, I'm afraid.  I don't know what is supposed to go into
"etc." that is causing problems in practice.  If anyone has a specific
list of additional programs for which this is a problem, appending them to
the lintian bug would be nice.  (Bug#398658)

> Please also detect this:
>> 
>>    . /usr/share/debconf/confmodule || true

>> They should really use 
>> 
>>    f=/usr/share/debconf/confmodule
>>    [ ! -e $f ] || . $f;

Please don't combine multiple issues in a single bug report.  (Although
you already reported this a while back as Bug#376183.)

These and several other requests for lintian (such as Bug#397785) are
currently not being worked on largely because lintian does not have good
facilities for doing complex analysis of maintainer scripts and most of
these requests ideally require a fair amount of state tracking and context
awareness to avoid false positives and false negatives.  Any suggestions
and (ideally) contributions towards solving this would be greatly
appreciated.  I'm starting to think that in order to do a good job with
these sorts of problems, lintian is going to have to acquire at least a
minimalist understanding of Bourne shell syntax so that it can do lexical
analysis of maintainer scripts.

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

Message #17 received at [email protected] (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Niels Thykier <[email protected]>

To: [email protected], [email protected]

Subject: Re: Bug#398658: lintian: Please detect unconditional use of some nonessential pkgs during purge

Date: Sat, 04 Jun 2011 19:18:51 +0200

Hey,

Perhaps we should mark this as wontfix and leave this to piuparts?  I
admit that Lintian is probably more used than piuparts by developers
(and it would catch this issue pre-upload).  Nevertheless we have not
done anything about this for 4+ years and alternatives exists.

~Niels

Message #25 received at [email protected] (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Russ Allbery <[email protected]>

To: [email protected], [email protected]

Subject: Re: Bug#398658: lintian: Please detect unconditional use of some nonessential pkgs during purge

Date: Sat, 04 Jun 2011 11:49:28 -0700

Niels Thykier <[email protected]> writes:

> Perhaps we should mark this as wontfix and leave this to piuparts?  I
> admit that Lintian is probably more used than piuparts by developers
> (and it would catch this issue pre-upload).  Nevertheless we have not
> done anything about this for 4+ years and alternatives exists.

I think we could do a better job of this than puiparts, since we can check
all the various branches and alternatives, not just the default case.
This is one of those open wishlist bugs that I was considering sort of
"soft-blocked" on the long-term, major project of integrating a real shell
parser into Lintian.

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

Message #33 received at [email protected] (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Niels Thykier <[email protected]>

To: [email protected]

Subject: Re: Bug#398658: lintian: Please detect unconditional use of some nonessential pkgs during purge

Date: Sat, 04 Jun 2011 22:31:01 +0200

block 398658 by 629247
thanks

On 2011-06-04 20:49, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Niels Thykier <[email protected]> writes:
> 
>> Perhaps we should mark this as wontfix and leave this to piuparts?  I
>> admit that Lintian is probably more used than piuparts by developers
>> (and it would catch this issue pre-upload).  Nevertheless we have not
>> done anything about this for 4+ years and alternatives exists.
> 
> I think we could do a better job of this than puiparts, since we can check
> all the various branches and alternatives, not just the default case.
> This is one of those open wishlist bugs that I was considering sort of
> "soft-blocked" on the long-term, major project of integrating a real shell
> parser into Lintian.
> 

I feared that might be the reason; indeed static analysis would yield
better code coverage in this case, but it does not help me with cleaning
up the tracker! :P

Anyhow, opened a bug for the shell parser that I will use as blocker for
bugs depending on said shell parser.  Hopefully, someone will get tried
of that bug and fix it and this one along with it. :D

~Niels

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