Bug 468286 - alsa-info tries to update (overwrite) itself
Summary: alsa-info tries to update (overwrite) itself
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED NEXTRELEASE
Alias: None
Product: Fedora
Classification: Fedora
Component: alsa-utils
Version: 9
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
medium
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Jaroslav Kysela
QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks: 1102375
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2008-10-23 21:29 UTC by Ville Skyttä
Modified: 2014-05-28 20:53 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

Fixed In Version: 1.0.19-2.fc10
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2009-03-02 16:57:07 UTC
Type: ---
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)

Description Ville Skyttä 2008-10-23 21:29:18 UTC
$ rpm -qf /usr/bin/alsa-info
alsa-utils-1.0.17-2.fc9.x86_64

$ alsa-info
ALSA Information Script v 0.4.41
--------------------------------

This script will collect information about your ALSA installation and sound related hardware, to help diagnose your problem.

By default, the collected information will be AUTOMATICALLY uploaded to a pastebin site.
If you do not wish for this to occur, run the script with the --no-upload argument

Do you want to run this script? [y/n] : y
                                                                                cp: cannot create regular file `/usr/bin/alsa-info': Permission denied
Newer version detected: 0.4.51
To view the ChangeLog, please visit http://hg.alsa-project.org/alsa/log/tip/alsa-info.sh
ALSA-Info script has been updated. Please re-run it.

----

So, alsa-info "phoned home" and found a newer version of itself available, and tried to overwrite itself with the newer one.  It didn't happen as I was not running it as root and thus /usr/bin/alsa-info could not be written to, but I don't think this is quite appropriate behavior for packaged software.

I suggest patching out the part where it downloads a newer copy of itself and tries to overwrite itself, and replacing it with something that just prints out info if a newer version is available and prints out a download URL so people can download it somewhere else without overwriting the original if they want to run the latest version.

Comment 1 Jaroslav Kysela 2009-02-04 10:37:52 UTC
This issue should be fixed in latest alsa-info shell script.

Comment 2 Ville Skyttä 2009-02-04 16:59:45 UTC
Not fixed.  The only difference now is that if run as non-root, the script is downloaded to /tmp/alsa-info.sh.  If run as root, it still tries to replace itself.

Non-root:

$ alsa-info
[...]
Newer version detected: 0.4.53
To view the ChangeLog, please visit http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-info.sh.changelog
ALSA-Info script has been downloaded as /tmp/alsa-info.sh.
Please, re-run it from new location.

Root:

# grep ^SCRIPT_VERSION /usr/bin/alsa-info
SCRIPT_VERSION=0.4.52
# alsa-info
[...]
Newer version detected: 0.4.53
To view the ChangeLog, please visit http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-info.sh.changelog
ALSA-Info script has been updated. Please re-run it.
# grep ^SCRIPT_VERSION /usr/bin/alsa-info
SCRIPT_VERSION=0.4.53

Comment 3 Jaroslav Kysela 2009-02-09 13:40:32 UTC
OK, I added more informative text what is script trying to do in 0.4.54 (alsa-utils-1.0.19-2 package for F-10), so user can cancel the upgrade operation.

Comment 4 Fedora Update System 2009-03-02 16:56:58 UTC
alsa-utils-1.0.19-2.fc10 has been pushed to the Fedora 10 stable repository.  If problems still persist, please make note of it in this bug report.


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