Debian Project Mancoosi Project
Debian Quality Assurance

EDOS-Debcheck: File Overwrite Errors

This page is about reporting file overwrite errors that occur when one package tries to install a file that is owned by a different package. I run at irregular intervals, but typically at least once per day, a script that proceeds as follows:

  1. Calculate from a recent Contents file a list of pairs of packages that share at least one file.
  2. Restrict the list obtained in (1) to those pairs of packages that are co-installable according to edos-debcheck.
  3. Try installation of every pair of packages remaining after step (2) in a fresh chroot.

Usually I do these checks for sid on amd64, in times of preparation of a release I might also check testing. There is a more detailed documentation on how this works.

Detected problems are filed as bugs, usually against both offending packages with severity Serious, with the list of files that are common to both packages according to the Contents file. Bugs (both bugs that I have filed as result of my script, and bugs that have been reported by others and that I have reproduced with my script) carry a usertag edos-file-overwrite for the user treinen@debian.org.

Note that piuparts does much more extensive tests of package installation and removal, and checks for different kinds of problems that may occur. One of the many tests done by piuparts now uses edos-debcheck to generate test candidates following the first two steps described above. Some categories of bugs are found by piuparts this way:

Made by Ralf Treinen. Last update Wed, 04 Apr 2012 15:58:07 +0200.
Copyright (C) 2008 Software in the Public Interest and others; See license terms.