apport should always check if a package's conffiles are modified

[Steve Langasek]

Several per-package apport hooks grab the conffiles for their particular package. But in general, we should always check whether a package that includes conffiles has had those conffiles modified by the admin. This information is available in the dpkg database; and while we can't assume it's safe to attach all modified conffiles (due to possibly sensitive contents), we can at least mention in the bug report if they've been modified.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

This is actually done already in apport for all apport-package bug reports:

def attach_conffiles(report, package, conffiles=None):
    '''Attach information about any modified or deleted conffiles'''

    try:
       dpkg = subprocess.Popen(['dpkg-query','-W','--showformat=${Conffiles}',
           package], stdout=subprocess.PIPE, close_fds=True)
    except OSError, e:
       return 'Error: ' + str(e)

    out = dpkg.communicate()[0]
    if dpkg.returncode != 0:
       return

    for line in out.splitlines():
        if not line:
            continue
        # just take the first two fields, to not stumble over obsolete
        # conffiles
        path, default_md5sum = line.strip().split()[:2]

        if conffiles and path not in conffiles: continue

        key = 'modified.conffile.' + path_to_key(path)

        if os.path.exists(path):
            contents = open(path).read()
            m = hashlib.md5()
            m.update(contents)
            calculated_md5sum = m.hexdigest()

            if calculated_md5sum != default_md5sum:
                report[key] = contents
                statinfo = os.stat(path)
                mtime = datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(statinfo.st_mtime)
                mtime_key = 'mtime.conffile.' + path_to_key(path)
                report[mtime_key] = mtime.isoformat()
        else:
            report[key] = '[deleted]'

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

I'm working on a branch to that'll ask a user whether or not a modified conffile should be attached to the bug report and this is being tracked in bug 811203.