Comment 1 for bug 165074

Am Donnerstag, den 08.12.2005, 22:31 -0600 schrieb Felipe Sanchez:
> Well, the first thing that would be useful to know is exactly what
> options did you use the last time you ran checkinstall. It would be really
> useful for trying to figure out what actually happened to your system.
> Please send it ;-)

Well, I did not use any command line parameters with checkinstall. When
I got asked for a package description I simply typed 'JRE', the package
name was 'fabian' and I changed the version number to '1.5', because
'dpkg' wants it to be a number.
That's what I *guess* to be the latest settings. As I stated before, the
errors occured when I wanted to get back from root to a normal user. So
there have been some minutes running 'dpkg -c' and 'dpkg -I' and similar
to test the package...

After some googling I found out that there are people who had the same
problem after using checkinstall.

German Debian Forum:
<http://beta.debianforum.de/forum/viewtopic.php?t=51830>
Ubuntu Forum:
<http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?mode=hybrid&t=54147>

In the German forum the user tells that he tried to cancel checkinstall
via 'ctrl+c' because he forgot to set some settings.
Same for me! I also remember I have canceled one (or more) of the
several checkinstall runs beacuse I entered wrong settings accidentally
(e.g. non-digit version number, 'yes' to include temporary files from
home dir, etc.).

I guess that is where the bug hides!
Wehen you cancel checkinstall at the wrong point, some restrictions are
not set back?!

> The second thing is, the other week I wanted to delete a file from my
> system. I had some trouble doing it. So I played with some of the options
> of the rm program and suddenly my system became completely unstable! Upon
> examination and after a lot of work I found out that the thing had removed
> half of the files of my system!

Well, I understand what you are going to tell me, BUT:
'rm' is a program to delete files, 'checkinstall' is not a program to
set permissions. I would never send a bug report to the 'chmod'
maintainer because I accidentelly set my filesystem's permissions to 700
myself!
And, as I stated before, I did not use different options that touch
checkinstall, but played around with settings like package description,
version, etc...

> The moral of the story: I agree with you, it MUST be guaranteed that no
> program leaves your system in such a state. I.e. don't mess with your
> system!
>
> But if the program's job IS to actually mess with the system (rm,
> checkinstall, installwatch, etc) then all you can do is to educate the
> user about it's proper use and do your best to avoid putting too much bugs
> in ;-)

Let's try to find out what the bug is and remove it...;)

Nice Greetings,
Fabian