[Bug 1282046] Re: Symlink /etc/motd gets removed on installation or upgrade from Precise

[Steve Langasek]

What exactly is problematic about this?  The /etc/motd symlink is
removed on upgrade because it is no longer being used by the stock PAM
config, in favor of reading /run/motd.dynamic directly.  (This change
was driven by the sysvinit maintainer in Debian; the previous setup
worked fine, but given that Debian has changed there doesn't seem to be
any benefit to *not* following suit.

If you had an existing /etc/motd which was not a symlink, it would be
preserved and would still be displayed on login.  If you had an
/etc/motd.tail that was being appended to /run/motd by /etc/update-
motd.d/99-footer, this would now be handled by a separate invocation of
pam_motd from the relevant pam config.

If there is software in Ubuntu that's not displaying the correct output
as a result of this change, please let us know what that is.  But this
doesn't appear to be a bug in the initscripts package's behavior.

** Changed in: sysvinit (Ubuntu)
       Status: New => Incomplete

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1282046

Title:
  Symlink /etc/motd gets removed on installation or upgrade from Precise

Status in “sysvinit” package in Ubuntu:
  Incomplete

Bug description:
  Hi everyone,

  The postinst maintainer script of the initscripts package contains this code:
  if dpkg --compare-versions "$PREV_VER" lt "2.88dsf-24" ; then
     if [ -L /etc/motd ] && [ "$(readlink /etc/motd)" = "/var/run/motd"  ]; then
         rm /etc/motd
  ...

  
  This code is problematic as it removes /etc/motd for new installs and during an upgrade from Precise.
  New installs:
  $ dpkg --compare-versions "" lt "2.88dsf-24" && echo true || echo false
  true

  Upgrade from Precise:
  $ dpkg --compare-versions "2.88dsf-13.10ubuntu11.1" lt "2.88dsf-24" && echo true || echo false
  true

  
  To me it looks like this issue is present since Saucy and got introduced with version 2.88dsf-41ubuntu1.

  Best,

  Michael Schaller

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