unnecessary constraints about qfiles in preinst

[James Troup]

Binary package hint: mailman

If mailman has actually changed the format of the pickles in qfiles, then sure, SKY-IS-FALLING-stop the upgrade. But this check is triggered even when the upgrade is just between ubuntu revisions (e.g. a security release), and being forced to clean out qfiles/ before being able to apply a security upgrade on a production server isn't acceptable.

[Thijs Kinkhorst (kink)]

I'm not sure if comparisons to fascism will motivate anyone to solve your bug.

[Nick Moffitt (nick-moffitt)]

This bug made upgrading to the recent security release for USN-586-1 unnecessarily difficult for me.

If the subject of the bug is blocking this from being fixed, then please change it. "Fascism" was only being used as jargon for over-zealous input validation or other constraints checking, and not as any sort of ad hominem attack or socio-political statement.

(I would note that it's probably more offensive to imply that there might somewhere be *necessary* fascism, but that would be trolling.)

[Thijs Kinkhorst (kink)]

Hi Nick,

The Mailman team (for Debian) currently is low on staff. If you experience this problem and can come up with a patch that would be less strict and of course would still guard against incompatible upgrades, that would surely be considered.

[Thijs Kinkhorst (kink)]

This has been addressed in mailman/1:2.1.11-8 which is in Debian. We cannot reliably detect whether the upgrade would be really harmful, but we've solved it for the case where you're "upgrading" to the same version (reinstall etc), and provide the option to continue installation regardless if you're willing to take the risk.

[Thijs Kinkhorst (kink)]

Fixed in 1:2.1.11-8