Friday, May 16, 2008

/usr/lib/python2.3 garbage

Yesterday I stumbled about files and dead symlinks left in /usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/ on my Sid box. These files/symlinks seem to have been shipped/created(?) by:

python-ldap python-cairo python-crypto kiki python-foomatic python-mysqldb
python-logilab-common python-egenix-mxtools python-numarray python-pygresql
python-imaging-sane python-imaging python-xml python-reportlab

Deleting /usr/lib/python2.3 (dpkg -S didn't show any package relationship nor did I find something in /var/lib/dpkg/info/) and reinstalling the above mentioned packages did not recreate the files/symlinks. So it seems the directory can be safely removed. Maybe I missed some announcement or one (or more) packages need to be fixed. No time to examine it atm.

Update

This is known as Debian bug #409390. Thanks to Josselin Mouette for the information.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

[DSA 1571-1] New openssl packages fix predictable random number generator

Ok, shit sometimes also happens to Debian users.

Now I read a lot of FUD, flames, arrogant claims and much more bad things, including blaming of downstream in general.

Well, Debian maintainers are NOT upstream authors. Maintainers often care about a lot more than just 1 package. Now I wonder if one can really expect, that maintainers know the source code of their packages as good as upstream authors do? Is this, what the user or the Debian project expects from a package maintainer? I agree, that this would be the ideal situation. But how realistic is it, if one maintains 10, 20 or more packages?

Normally users report us issues. We take a look at the source, try to catch the issue, track it down and fix it. And IMHO in almost all cases this is enough and it lets us handle several packages. And maybe this is also, what happened here. The maintainer got a report, tracked it down and tried to fix it. It seems, he posted it to the openssl-dev list, which is to my reading considered for such questions, and got a positive response. And with fixing it, he made a horrible mistake. But apparently it also seems, that the question had been discussed earlier more than just once (I wish, the OpenSSL guys would have created the FAQ entry earlier).

I don't want to blame the maintainer for doing this mistake. We are humans. But do we need another instance, that (periodically) checks (probably only Debian-specific) patches/changes to security relevent software or do we need different requirements for maintainers of such software [1] or should we simply archive this under “Shit sometimes happens … even to Debian users”?

[1] Consider gnupg which is currently almost unmaintained. It also has Debian specific patches applied and I wonder, which skills the new maintainer should or must(?) have (IIRC this question was raised in the linked threads too)?