[distcc] Re: Red Hat packaging patch for 0.15

[Martin Pool]

On 18 Dec 2002, Chris Halls <halls at debian.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 18, 2002 at 10:14:57AM +1100, Martin Pool wrote:
> > The problem then is that you may have files or processes hanging
> > around with no name for their uid, which is confusing.
> 
> It is probably brief-lived enough not to worry too much, as long as the
> package does a reasonable job of making sure no old temporary files are
> around, and the only thing expected to live on for a few seconds is a
> running compiler process, and even that is unlikely to happen in most real
> world situations.

distcc will leave temporary files around if it's interrupted, and lock
files indefinitely, in the hope that they'll be removed by the
tmpreaper.

> > On brief inspection, Debian seems to not remove users when the
> > packages are removed.  uids are plentiful.
> 
> That is a bug - packages are supposed to remove their uids on purge and I
> think most already do.  Did you maybe look at packages which have been
> removed but not purged?

Sorry, I just misread it.  Yes, doing it for purge but not for remove
is probably a good compromise.

> The Debian distcc package removes the user, logfile and inetd entry in the
> postrm script:
> 
> case "$1" in
>     purge)
>         echo y|update-inetd --remove 4200 > /dev/null 2>&1
>         rm -rf /var/log/distccd.log

Wouldn't this leave rotated logs behind?

>         if id distccd >/dev/null; then
>             # Careful!  Never destroy home dir (/), and deluser can be
>             # configured to always do that (there's no
>             # --no-remove-home flag)
>             userdel distccd
>         fi
>         ;;

Possibly it ought to rm the distcc user's distcc temporary directory
as well.

Rusty originally packaged distcc, but he has a lot on his plate at the
moment, what with breaking the 2.5's module system and so on.  Perhaps
some other Debian developer would like to offer to take over?  I'd
like releases to get into unstable more often.

-- 
Martin