On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 08:01:52PM +0200, Thijs Kinkhorst wrote: > Hi Marcin, > > On Friday 29 February 2008 17:03, Marcin Owsiany wrote: > > I am currently preparing an installation of mailman on our system. In > > order to provide durability of the processed messages, we are going to > > arrange for /var/lib/mailman to be located on a block-level replicated > > filesystem. Thus, if the box crashes, we will just mount the "safe" > > filesystem on a fresh one and rebuild it (install packages and apply > > configs). > > > > However the current mailman's preinst makes it problematic, as it bombs > > out if there are any queue files present. My guess is that it should be > > safe to install the same version of the software as the one which > > created the queue files? In that case it would really help if there was > > a way to override this check in some way. > > Yes, this check could be improved (it's now too wide-ranging, at least it's > safe but can be very inconvenient). However, the mailman team is currently > not very well staffed. > > If you or anyone else experiencing trouble with this can come up with a patch > that improves this test's behaviour I'd gladly consider it.
I had a look at the mailman upstream UPGRADE documentation as well as some bugs and reports on mailing list. My conclusion is that at this point it won't be safe to allow any upgrades with the queue files in place. The only safe thing would be precisely my use case: allow exactly the same version to be installed as the one previously installed. Obviously this is only useful for reinstalling the same version, or for disaster recovery, but I still think this is worth including. I have prepared a patch (attached). Before applying, do a: svn mv debian/preinst debian/preinst.in I hated to make the script a preprocessed file, but I could not find any better way of determining the currently installed version in preinst. It seems to produce a valid .deb file, although I have not tested actually installing the package. -- Marcin Owsiany <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://marcin.owsiany.pl/ GnuPG: 1024D/60F41216 FE67 DA2D 0ACA FC5E 3F75 D6F6 3A0D 8AA0 60F4 1216
--- debian/preinst.in (revision 572)
+++ debian/preinst.in (working copy)
@@ -16,14 +16,32 @@
#DEBHELPER#
-# make sure the qfiles directory is empty.
-if [ -d /var/lib/mailman/qfiles ] && \
- [ "$(find /var/lib/mailman/qfiles -type f | wc -l)" -ne 0 ]; then
- # uh-oh.
+abort_install()
+{
db_fset mailman/queue_files_present seen false || true
db_input critical mailman/queue_files_present || true
db_go
exit 1
+}
+
+# make sure the qfiles directory is empty.
+if [ -d /var/lib/mailman/qfiles ] && \
+ [ "$(find /var/lib/mailman/qfiles -type f | wc -l)" -ne 0 ]; then
+ # Check if the queue files were created by the same version as the one we're about to install
+ if [ -r /var/lib/mailman/.version ]; then
+ # First check the stamp file.
+ # It is more general because it will show the previous version in the
+ # case that /var/lib/mailman is on permanent storage (e.g. a SAN) and
+ # we are being installed for the first time.
+ previous_version=$(cat /var/lib/mailman/.version)
+ else
+ # Fall back to reading dpkg-provided argument (in case previous version did not leave the stamp file)
+ previous_version="$2"
+ fi
+ if [ "@VERSION@" != "${previous_version}" ]; then
+ # we don't know which version the files are from
+ abort_install
+ fi
fi
exit 0
--- debian/rules (revision 572)
+++ debian/rules (working copy)
@@ -4,6 +4,7 @@
package=mailman
PACKAGE=$(package)
+VERSION=$(shell dpkg-parsechangelog | awk '$$1 == "Version:" {print $$2}')
include /usr/share/quilt/quilt.make
@@ -25,6 +26,7 @@
build: patch build-stamp
build-stamp: Makefile debian/po/templates.pot
$(MAKE)
+ sed 's,@VERSION@,$(VERSION),g' < debian/preinst.in > debian/preinst
touch build-stamp
debian/po/templates.pot: debian/templates
@@ -47,6 +49,7 @@
[ ! -f Makefile ] || $(MAKE) distclean
rm -rf build-stamp Makefile debian/ucffiles debian/mailman.postinst.ucf
rm -f debian/mailman.postrm.ucf
+ rm -f debian/preinst
dh_clean
chmod +x debian/{prerm,postinst}
@@ -101,6 +104,9 @@
# link it back to /var/lib/mailman/templates
dh_link etc/mailman var/lib/$(package)/templates
+ # note the current version to avoid aborting on same-version
+ # reinstallations - see the preinst script
+ echo "$(VERSION)" > debian/mailman/var/lib/$(package)/.version
# move the pending subscriptions database so it doesnt overwrite the
# old one when installing
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