Piuparts failures: a quick overview

[Lars Wirzenius]

I've done a quick review of the packages that fail piuparts tests[1].
Mostly it's a matter of packages not cleaning up completely when they're
removed. For example, makedev used to have an init.d file in the dapper
version, but seems to not have it anymore in the hardy version; what
this means is that if you have makedev installed in dapper, upgrade to
gutsy, and then remove and purge makedev, the init.d conffile will
remain, and so will /etc/rc?.d/* symlinks to it. (For normal files, this
shouldn't happend, but for conffiles it does.) However, since makedev is
a required package, this scenario is extremely unlikely to happen in
real life. We have more important things to worry about.

Almost all problems are of the above kind: not really worth worrying
about right now. The possible exception are the texlive packages that
fail, which they do because of a missing dependency. The postinst script
in the packages runs a command update-updmap, but they have no
dependency on a package that provides that.

This is still probably going to somewhat unlikely, but at least it's
plausible, and probably going to be happening to real users (as opposed
to those of us who just want to break things). Thus, I reported it as a
bug[2].

Other than these problems, I'm quite pleasantly surprised how well
Ubuntu main succeeds with piuparts.

[1] http://people.ubuntu.com/~liw/piuparts/ubuntu-hardy-i386-main/fail/
[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/177674