BUG: ghostview-1.5.mpkg in Tiger-Packages overwrites /etc, kills system login

[rajeev@…]

Dear Darwinports, I tried installing the ghostview-1.5.mpkg (the binary from the Tiger-Packages dir in the packages.opendarwin.org WebDAV. It seemed to go fine, apart from the very old version of ghostview that it installed! But then no new terminal windows would open, and sudo would give "unable to initialize PAM: No such file or directory" It turns out that the package had overwritten /etc/, so that instead of being linked to /private/etc/ where master.passwd resides, instead there was a dir /etc/X11/app-defaults/ghostview (if I remember it correctly, it's deleted now).

A reboot failed --- dropping me into a bare shell, and a second reboot hung completely. Luckily I still had a 10.3.9 partition to boot from, from where I was able to figure out what the problem was and fix the /etc link.

This ghostview package (or maybe the ghostscript package that it also installs?) is extremely dangerous! For a while I thought that I would have to completely reinstall Tiger.

I thought that darwinports installs were all meant to go into /opt/local/, leaving system files untouched? Overwriting the main system password file is definitely bad behaviour!

Raj

[jjramsey@…]

I was hit by this bug, too. I recovered by doing an upgrade from the Tiger CD. Raising the severity to critical, since wiping out the /etc directory is pretty severe.

[jmpp@…]

* Bug 3085 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. *

[rajeev@…]

The ghostview and ghostscript packages are both still on packages.opendarwin.org (both last modified Apr.30,2005). It strikes me that maybe they should be removed until the bug has been fixed, so that other people don't have their systems messed up in the meantime. I'm not sure which of the two packages is the one that overwrote /etc, I guess probably only one is the guilty package and should be removed.

[toby@…]

This is actually easier to fix than you'd think:

rm -fr /etc ln -s private/etc /etc

[toby@…]

Heh, I'm somewhat interested in knowing where you found out about packages.opendarwin.org in the first place. It's far from supported, and mostly exists as a test of our packaging stuff. Anyway, I've finally got X11 installed on a box, and and working on fixing this.

[markd@…]

I have seen this but not for a long time. I think it must be fixed by now, and I'm sure it doesn't have to do with this port anyway. If the problem resurfaces we should have some more up-to-date information anyway. Closing.

[(none)]

Milestone Port Bugs deleted