Today I tried dist-upgrade of some other package in a pbuilder chroot,
and login wasn't yet updated in the base.tar.gz:

Preparing to replace login 1:4.0.12-3 (using .../login_1%3a4.0.12-5_i386.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement login ...
Setting up login (4.0.12-5) ...

Configuration file `/etc/pam.d/su'
 ==> File on system created by you or by a script.
 ==> File also in package provided by package maintainer.

Since this is a pbuilder tar.gz, I'm sure I have never changed or
created this file;  there must be an error in the -5 upload.

Thanks in advance,
Frank

Hello,

I think this is a side effect of #330291.

In 1:4.0.12-3, we did not distribute /etc/pam.d/su, so this is normal that
4.0.12-5 considers that this file was created by you.

If you or another shadow maintainer agree, I think we can close this bug.

Kind Regards,

Nicolas François <nicolas.francois@centraliens.net> wrote:

I agree that it's not a bug in shadow, and will cause no harm because it
will only occur once when upgrading from -3 to -(n>3).  However, it
seems to be a bug in dpkg to not support the "resurrection" of
conffiles.

Regards, Frank

reassign 330874 dpkg
thanks

A short summary:

During one day, in version 4.0.12-3, the login package did not include
/etc/pam.d/su because of a bug in the package build process. The file
was there in 4.0.12-2, was removed in -3 and was re-added in -4.

This file came back very quickly in the package, but it seems that
users who did the two upgrades (-2 --> -3, then -3 --> -4) were then
prompted about replacing "their" /etc/pam.d/su file (which was just
kept from the -2 version).


Frank Küster, the bug submitter, thinks this is a bug in dpkg. However
I'm not sure he's right because that means that dpkg should have kept
the md5sum of the N-2 version while upgrading the N-1 to N version.


I think this is impossible, but I leave to you, Scott, the final word
on it.