Alien does not always get permissions right in RPM to DEB

[Duane Waddle]

Binary package hint: alien

I am using alien version 8.73 on Ubuntu Jaunty. A particular RPM I was trying to convert had some non-root suid/sgid binaries - these permissions were not being preserved in the alien-produced .deb package. The alien postinst script was setting the ownership correctly, but not the permissions. I think I found an operator precedence bug in /usr/share/perl5/Alien/Package/Rpm.pm, line 258:

if (defined($owninfo{$file}) && ($mode & 07000 > 0)) {

This line should read as:

if (defined($owninfo{$file}) && (($mode & 07000) > 0)) {

The precedence of ">" above "&" appears to have the effect of the owninfo hash only being updated on files with world-execute set.

Patch is attached

[Anzenketh (anzenketh)]

Thanks for reporting this bug and any supporting documentation. Since this bug has enough information provided for a developer to begin work, I'm going to mark it as confirmed and let them handle it from here. Thanks for taking the time to make Ubuntu better!

[Dimitri John Ledkov (xnox)]

Thank you for helping make Ubuntu better.

Can you please provide a sample rpm which has this problem? I couldn't find a valid candidate as a test case for this problem. Thanks.

[Duane Waddle (duane-waddle)]

Hi Dmitrijs - The only example I have is a piece of commercial software, IBM WebSphere MQ 7.0.1. The RPM I was trying to work on was MQSeriesServer-7.0.1-0.i386.rpm. It is far from a simple testcase however.

I think you can download a copy from http://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/download/preconfig.jsp?id=2009-08-28+03:34:46.648052R&S_TACT=104CBW71&S_CMP=%20wmqtrk

I can understand if you don't want to fool with this particular RPM. If necessary, I will make up a simplified testcase based on the WebSphere RPM. Please advise.

[Dimitri John Ledkov (xnox)]

>
> I can understand if you don't want to fool with this particular RPM.  If
> necessary, I will make up a simplified testcase based on the WebSphere
> RPM.  Please advise.
>

Nah, I'm fine =) I will fool around with it. Thanks a lot.

[Andrew Starr-Bochicchio (andrewsomething)]

Fixed in Maverick:

alien (8.81) unstable; urgency=low

   * Avoid uninitialized value warning when debian/rules fails to run
     due to alien being run in a noexec directory. Closes: #579216
   * Prevent DESTROY stomping on alien's exit code sometimes.
   * Support extracting lzma compressed RPMs.
     (Patch by unnamed person on some bug tracking system I don't frequent.)
   * Suggest lzma. If not installed, alien will still fail to decompress
     RPMs using it, but will support most rpms, which are not.
   * Fix precedence problem that prevented alien from preserving permissions
     of suid/sgid binaries that are not owned by root.
     (Patch by Duane Waddle, on a bug tracking system I don't frequent, that
     was about the "expire" it 4 days from now. We got lucky Duane, but please
     use the Debian BTS next time!)
   * Support RPMs containing ghost files.
     (Patch by Ben Webb, who would get his patches applied quicker if he
     actually communicated them to the program's author.)

 -- Joey Hess <email address hidden> Mon, 17 May 2010 20:56:59 -0400