Bug#342578: checkinstall leaves system in unusable state

[Fabian Greffrath]

Am Donnerstag, den 08.12.2005, 22:31 -0600 schrieb Felipe Sanchez:
> Well, the first thing that would be useful to know is exactly what 
> options did you use the last time you ran checkinstall. It would be really 
> useful for trying to figure out what actually happened to your system. 
> Please send it ;-)

Well, I did not use any command line parameters with checkinstall. When
I got asked for a package description I simply typed 'JRE', the package
name was 'fabian' and I changed the version number to '1.5', because
'dpkg' wants it to be a number.
That's what I *guess* to be the latest settings. As I stated before, the
errors occured when I wanted to get back from root to a normal user. So
there have been some minutes running 'dpkg -c' and 'dpkg -I' and similar
to test the package...

After some googling I found out that there are people who had the same
problem after using checkinstall. 

German Debian Forum:

Ubuntu Forum:


In the German forum the user tells that he tried to cancel checkinstall
via 'ctrl+c' because he forgot to set some settings. 
Same for me! I also remember I have canceled one (or more) of the
several checkinstall runs beacuse I entered wrong settings accidentally
(e.g. non-digit version number, 'yes' to include temporary files from
home dir, etc.).

I guess that is where the bug hides!
Wehen you cancel checkinstall at the wrong point, some restrictions are
not set back?!

> The second thing is, the other week I wanted to delete a file from my 
> system. I had some trouble doing it. So I played with some of the options 
> of the rm program and suddenly my system became completely unstable! Upon 
> examination and after a lot of work I found out that the thing had removed 
> half of the files of my system!

Well, I understand what you are going to tell me, BUT:
'rm' is a program to delete files, 'checkinstall' is not a program to
set permissions. I would never send a bug report to the 'chmod'
maintainer because I accidentelly set my filesystem's permissions to 700
myself!
And, as I stated before, I did not use different options that touch
checkinstall, but played around with settings like package description,
version, etc...

> The moral of the story: I agree with you, it MUST be guaranteed that no 
> program leaves your system in such a state. I.e. don't mess with your 
> system!
> 
> But if the program's job IS to actually mess with the system (rm, 
> checkinstall, installwatch, etc) then all you can do is to educate the 
> user about it's proper use and do your best to avoid putting too much bugs 
> in ;-)

Let's try to find out what the bug is and remove it...;)

Nice Greetings,
Fabian




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Bug#342578: checkinstall leaves system in unusable state

[Fabian Greffrath]

package: checkinstall
version: 1.5.3-3
severity: grave

Hello!

I wanted to use checkinstall to create a 'Sun Java JRE' Package out of
Sun's self-installing bin-file. So I started
'checkinstall ./jre-1_5_0-$foo.bin' as root several times and tried out
some of the options to make the package meet my needs.

After playing around with checkinstall a bit, a severe problem occured
on my system: 
I could not log in as a normal user anymore but only as root. Trying to
log in as a normal user allways gave the error message 'no shell'.
Programs like exim4, sudo and gdm did not work anymore either.

After a lot of work and time I found out that the permissions of the
base dir '/' were set to 700! So a simple 'chmod 755 /' was the
solution.

Nevertheless I have not been far away from reinstalling Debian!

I do not know if 'checkinstall' itself or 'installwatch' are blamable on
this, but I think that it MUST be guaranteed that no program leaves your
system in such a state. No matter if the user has done a handling
error / faulty operation or not.

I send a bcc-copy to the upstream author as well!

Nice Greetings,
Fabian




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