Source: dpkg
Version: 1.18.15
Severity: serious
Affects apt
Hello,
I'm now filing the bug against dpkg as promised, see below:
>From debian-devel on November 30 2016:
On Tue, 2016-11-29 at 19:18 +0100, Simon Richter wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 29.11.2016 17:58, Svante Signell wrote:
>
> > After upgrading to sid the conffiles don't seem to be installed any longer?
> > Examples are bash, passwd, basefiles and libpam-runtime. Especially the
> > last one cost me a day debugging to find out why logins crashed. What is
causing this, do I have some settings disabling conffiles?
> The usual rule applies: if dpkg thinks the conffile has been
> deliberately deleted, it will not install a new version on top. The
> question is how that happened.
The probable cause was a hardware error om my SSD disk. Subsequent disk checking
wiped out several files, among them the important conffiles.
> To force reinstallation of configuration files, invoke dpkg with the
> "--force-confmiss" option when installing. This will only restore
> missing configuration files, but not overwrite changed ones. If some
> configuration files were damaged, you can use "--force-confnew" to
> unpack all configuration files; your old files can be found with a
> ".dpkg-old" suffix then.
A problem with essential and important packages is that you can only reinstall
them. So apt-get install --reinstall or dpkg -i only reinstalls
the package, not the conffiles. Now I know how to get the conffiles back, but
tracing which packages has them is hard: Any ideas?
Anyway, I think the default behaviour of dpkg is wrong: If you have
intentionally or by accident removed some conffiles, they should be installed by
default with a reinstall. I'll file a serious bug on dpkg for it.
Thanks!
