citadel privileges error or citadel postinst script buggy

[Tobias]

This is rather a question and maybe not a bug, but I hope the citadel Debian Team will read this.

I have debian stable running but I am pinning to wheezy for citadel server,client,webcit.

On upgrading to 8.05-3 from -2 citadel-server stopped and failed to start.
Returning to -2 version works fine.

Did you change anything, like added dependencies not in the Depends: list or compiled against a new libdb version or something?

Since citadel-server is not very talkative, strace did not return something usefull and since the manpage is non-existent and the documentation on citadel.org is weird, I file this as a bug, sorry.

My apt/preferences looks like this:

Package: *
Pin: release n=wheezy
Pin-Priority: 200

Package: libcitadel2 citadel-webcit citadel-server citadel-mta citadel-client
Pin: release n=wheezy
Pin-Priority: 700

Package: multiarch-support libdb5.1 libssl1.0.0 openssh-client openssh-server libgssapi-krb5-2 libkrb5-3 libk5crypto3 libkrb5support0
Pin: release n=wheezy
Pin-Priority: 700

Package: libc6 libc6-dev libc6-xen libc-bin libc-dev-bin libc6-i686 locales
Pin: release n=wheezy
Pin-Priority: 700

Package: libkrb5-dev krb5-multidev libgssrpc4 make pkg-config
Pin: release n=wheezy
Pin-Priority: 700

Thanks in advance.

[Tobias (ulbricht-tobias)]

turns out:

* upgrade to 8.05-3 is not the reason,
* the reason for the non-starter is the ownership of
/var/lib/citadel/data/citadel.config and/or the user that runs citadel
in 8.05

Using the 8.05* packages, citadel is run by root, but the upgrade script
converts the db files to belong to the "citadel" user, which is why
citadel does not start. If my installation is correct, this is still a bug.

I'm still checking how it is on a wheezy system when you install citadel
from scratch. Is it supposed to be run by root or "citadel"?

[Tobias (ulbricht-tobias)]

In my new debian/wheezy installation, after installing citadel-server,
it runs as user "root", while 7.x in debian/squeeze runs as "citadel"
(one of the processes also as root).

Now, I checked the postinst script in 8.05:

chown -R citadel:citadel /var/lib/citadel

is the culprit.
Either citadel is supposed to run as "citadel" not as root. Then the
line is ok, but I don't see why the citadel-server process does not drop
privileges to "citadel".

Or citadel is supposed to run as root, then the postinst script is not
ok and will break the installation on the next upgrade/configure call.