On Tue, Jun 10, 2025 at 11:55:40PM +0000, [email protected] wrote:

Package: checkinstall
Version: 1.6.2+git20170426.d24a630-3+b1

There are reports in Ubuntu of checkinstall "bricking" the system:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/checkinstall/+bug/1847582 https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/x08ex6/psa_checkinstall_can_brick_your_ubuntu_2204_system/

Debian has a variety of patches, but there is not a patch that I can see
for this issue.
...

From 2012 until November 2023 Ubuntu shipped a checkinstall that
disabled file system translation by default: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/checkinstall/+publishinghistory

These reports seem to be related to that Ubuntu-only change?

cu
Adrian

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On Wed, 09 Jul 2025 19:13:08 +0000 [email protected] wrote:

On 7/9/25 15:00, Adrian Bunk wrote:

From 2012 until November 2023 Ubuntu shipped a checkinstall that
disabled file system translation by default: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/checkinstall/+publishinghistory
These reports seem to be related to that Ubuntu-only change?

cu
Adrian

I think there are two true bugs related to those reports, neither of them being the Ubuntu default.

The first is that various things cannot build without --fstrans=no (because the translation does not seem to work for what seem to be some pretty simple shell scripts).

The second is that --fstrans=no is DANGEROUS in its current implementation. Even if you're using --fstrans=no I think users should be able to assume that an interrupt should finish the restore to the prior file system state. This is not people being

bit by a build that does something nasty, this is the tool breaking their system because they sent a SIGINT to it.

We're not talking about SIGKILL here, checkinstall should clean up after itself gracefully.

- Wyatt

From what i can see the defaults in debian do not break the system and i
think just using --fstrans=no itself doesn't either (with a very simple
test script for installation, maybe if the backup code triggers it might be worse).

Do we have a concrete example of an invocation that breaks the system with
the version in trixie?

Of course checkinstall is from a time where doing all this safely was much harder than it would be today with namespaces and overlay fs.
But do the current limitations make it useless?

- Martin

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