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

Full log

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

Received: (at 398658) by bugs.debian.org; 15 Nov 2006 02:18:19 +0000
From [email protected] Tue Nov 14 18:18:18 2006
Return-path: <[email protected]>
Received: from smtp3.stanford.edu ([171.67.20.26])
	by spohr.debian.org with esmtp (Exim 4.50)
	id 1GkALy-0000Nl-Mm
	for [email protected]; Tue, 14 Nov 2006 18:18:18 -0800
Received: from smtp3.stanford.edu (localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1])
	by localhost (Postfix) with SMTP id 282524BE9B;
	Tue, 14 Nov 2006 18:18:17 -0800 (PST)
Received: from windlord.stanford.edu (windlord.Stanford.EDU [171.64.19.147])
	by smtp3.stanford.edu (Postfix) with ESMTP id 048E64BDFC;
	Tue, 14 Nov 2006 18:18:17 -0800 (PST)
Received: by windlord.stanford.edu (Postfix, from userid 1000)
	id F348FE78F0; Tue, 14 Nov 2006 18:18:16 -0800 (PST)
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
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]> (Justin Pryzby's
	message of "Tue, 14 Nov 2006 15:35:19 -0500")
Organization: The Eyrie
References: <[email protected]>
	<[email protected]>
	<[email protected]>
	<[email protected]>
Date: Tue, 14 Nov 2006 18:18:16 -0800
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
User-Agent: Gnus/5.110006 (No Gnus v0.6) XEmacs/21.4.19 (linux)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.60-bugs.debian.org_2005_01_02 
	(1.212-2003-09-23-exp) on spohr.debian.org
X-Spam-Level: 
X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-6.0 required=4.0 tests=BAYES_00,HAS_BUG_NUMBER 
	autolearn=no version=2.60-bugs.debian.org_2005_01_02

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/>

Send a report that this bug log contains spam.