Comment 0 for bug 793318
Revision history for this message
| André Pirard (a.pirard) wrote apturl can silently uninstall vital packets like network-manager | #0 |
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bbfa235
(Get the code!)
Binary package hint: apturl
This happened on Ubuntu 10.04 upgraded from 8.10 and with latest updates applied.
1. What you expected to happen
The same as what happened, but without the inconvenience
2. What actually happened
In order to help Belgian people paying their income taxes, I reviewed, modified and tested
http://
In the process, I uninstalled all the Belgian middleware *beid* as well as *pcsc* software.
(Not pcsclite1 because network-manager depends on it)
Then I clicked the following link on that page apt://pcscd,
And this is what happened, taken from the APT logs.
APTURL did not display what it was doing, even less ask the permission to do it:
Start-Date: 2010-10-17 05:06:49
Install: pcscd (1.5.3-1ubuntu4)
Remove: libacr38ucontrol0 (1.7.10-1), network-manager (0.8-0ubuntu3), libgnokii5 (0.6.28.
End-Date: 2010-10-17 05:07:56
Start-Date: 2010-10-17 07:05:14
Remove: pcscd (1.5.3-1ubuntu4)
End-Date: 2010-10-17 07:05:32
Start-Date: 2010-10-17 07:34:37
Remove: network-manager (0.8-0ubuntu3), network-
End-Date: 2010-10-17 07:35:16
The system must never uninstall the network-manager nor anything without asking the permission.
3. The minimal series of steps necessary to make it happen, where step 1 is "start the program"
1: "start the program"
2: all of the above
Conclusions:
1 it's an extremely bad idea to make an installer (APTURL) behave silently and blindly.
No detail of what is being done, no permission and even no indication that the operation is complete.
I have seen that the Ubuntu Software Center operates the same silent, blind and dangerous way too.
2 it looks like it's a bad idea to have each packet of the same aptline installed separately