Package: libc6 Version: 2.1.2-8 Architecture: sparc, if it matters
On upgrading my stable Debian/Sparc box to unstable, I ran into the following: libc6's postinst says: Name Service Switch has changed in the C Library. Running programs may not be able to do NSS lookups until they are restarted (for services such as ssh, this can affect your ability to login). Note: restarting sshd should not affect any existing connections. The services restarted (if present) are: smail, sendmail, exim, ssh, netbase, apache, boa, nis, and proftpd. If other services begin to fail mysteriously after this upgrade, it may be necessary to restart them too. Do you wish to Restart Services? [Y/n] If you select 'Y' and one of the services doesn't restart, the postinst bombs out and libc6 is left in the 'unconfigured' state, which is a bit drastic for such a critical package. [In this case, it fell over because ssh 1.2.22-2 doesn't support /etc/init.d/ssh restart, only stop|start|reload...] I think it would be a bit nicer to allow the user to choose whether to abort the upgrade if a service fails to restart. Also, it might be a good idea to do a stop-then-start rather than restart, since I think that's more likely to be supported by elderly init.d scripts. Peter Maydell
