[Bug 1893724] [NEW] safe-rm breaks upgrades from 18.04 to 20.04

[François Marier]

Public bug reported:

I upgraded from bionic to focal this weekend and discovered that one of
my packages (safe-rm) can totally break the 20.04 upgrade. Not sure how
reproducible it is (I only upgraded once), but I had to remove safe-rm
before manually restarting the failed upgrade.

It comes down to the fact that safe-rm takes over the rm command and
unfortunately is written in Perl so while Perl isn't quite working (e.g.
while it's being upgraded), the rm command is broken :/

I just pushed out a fix to limit the takeover to interactive shells only
(https://salsa.debian.org/debian/safe-
rm/-/commit/6dbe2adaed423f61464c343f8b9a1b1f42f721f4), but the real fix
which I'm hoping to get to in the next few weeks is to rewrite the tool
in Rust (https://bugs.launchpad.net/safe-rm/+bug/1854103) to avoid
depending on an interpreter.

That said, it's a pretty serious issue so probably the best thing for
20.04 might be to conflict on the package somehow to make sure it's
uninstalled prior to the upgrade.

I wasn't sure which package to file this bug against so please re-assign
if needed.

** Affects: ubuntu-release-upgrader (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1893724

Title:
  safe-rm breaks upgrades from 18.04 to 20.04

Status in ubuntu-release-upgrader package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  I upgraded from bionic to focal this weekend and discovered that one
  of my packages (safe-rm) can totally break the 20.04 upgrade. Not sure
  how reproducible it is (I only upgraded once), but I had to remove
  safe-rm before manually restarting the failed upgrade.

  It comes down to the fact that safe-rm takes over the rm command and
  unfortunately is written in Perl so while Perl isn't quite working
  (e.g. while it's being upgraded), the rm command is broken :/

  I just pushed out a fix to limit the takeover to interactive shells
  only (https://salsa.debian.org/debian/safe-
  rm/-/commit/6dbe2adaed423f61464c343f8b9a1b1f42f721f4), but the real
  fix which I'm hoping to get to in the next few weeks is to rewrite the
  tool in Rust (https://bugs.launchpad.net/safe-rm/+bug/1854103) to
  avoid depending on an interpreter.

  That said, it's a pretty serious issue so probably the best thing for
  20.04 might be to conflict on the package somehow to make sure it's
  uninstalled prior to the upgrade.

  I wasn't sure which package to file this bug against so please re-
  assign if needed.

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