[Mageia-dev] Issue affecting several packages that will break upgrades from Mageia 2 to Mageia 3

[David Walser]

A behavior change in rpm 4.11 that affects several packages will cause upgrades from Mageia 2 to Mageia 3 to fail.

It considers two additional cases to be "file conflicts," although they are actually issues with directories.  We will need to fix the affected packages to prevent this from being an issue for upgrades.

The first case is if any directories in a package have been changed to symlinks, or vise versa.  While that has always been a problem, the fix for it had always been to have a %pre script to remove what the old package had, so that the upgraded package would install cleanly.  This no longer works, as rpm now detects the conflict before %pre scripts are run.  Now the removal needs to happen in a %pretrans script instead.

Thierry compiled a list of packages that remove things in %pre scripts, so these are the ones that might be affected.  In some cases, what the actual %pre script is doing may be unrelated to this issue.  In other cases, the %pre script may be there for a packaging change made far in the past, and no longer be needed.  The list is here:
https://bugs.mageia.org/attachment.cgi?id=3378

The second case is when two different packages own the same directory, but differ in the ownership and/or permissions for that directory.  It used to be that the directory's ownership/permissions would just get changed every time one of these packages were installed, now it is a conflict.

Luc wrote a script to find directories owned by multiple packages with differing ownership and permissions.  Unless the packages already explicitly conflict, all of these should be changed.  Ideally, we should drop the ownership in all but one package.  When that's not appropriate, the ownership and permissions should match in both/all packages.  Here are the script, and the list of packages it produced:
https://bugs.mageia.org/attachment.cgi?id=3448
https://bugs.mageia.org/attachment.cgi?id=3451

As you can see, almost all of those are man page directories, which IMO should only be owned by the man-pages-* packages.