Dpkg 1.8.x in unstable supports a new dpkg-statoverride mechanism that allows the permissions and owners of any file to be overridden, in a manner that is persistent accross upgrades. We are now ready to begin the transition from suidmanager to the new mechanism.
Today suidregister 0.50 was installed into unstable. When you upgrade to this version of suidregister, your /etc/suid.conf file will be imported into dpkg-statoverride, and removed. After that, if you install any packages that use suidregister, they should notice that the suidmanager command does not exist anymore, and fall back to not using it. We've given a great deal of thought to the transition, and it should be painless and trouble-free. Although packages that used to use suidmanager will keep working more or less all right, they should be updated as soon as possible to no longer call suidregister in their postinst and postrm scripts. Instead, packages now can just include suid/sgid binaries in the .deb, and dpkg-statoverride will automatically work. There is one wrinkle: If your package previously used suidmanager, and you convert it to not, you should make it Conflicts: suidmanager (<< 0.50). (The details of why are a little messy; see earlier discussion on debian-devel.) For debhelper users: Debhelper 2.2.12, which should be installed tomorrow (in Incoming now) has been modified to use the new system (just follow the warning/error messages the new version of dh_suidregister displays.) Once again, I urge everyone who has a package that uses suidmanager to change it so it does not, and add the necessary versioned conflicts. Thank you. -- see shy jo