/etc/logrotate.d/exim4-paniclog has wrong content

Thanks for filing a bug.

I can confirm the issue. It happens only in Oracular and, strangely, Debian isn't affected by it. Maybe there's some Ubuntu-specific patch interfering with dh_installlogrotate? Not sure.

Setting as Triaged. Someone from the team will look into this one.

Thanks.

I'm not spotting anything in the Ubuntu delta that could cause this behavior change. I do confirm it, though:

noble: (Installed: 4.97-4ubuntu4.1)
    triage-noble+24.04: /etc/logrotate.d$ grep log exim4-*
    exim4-base:/var/log/exim4/mainlog /var/log/exim4/rejectlog {
    exim4-paniclog:/var/log/exim4/paniclog {

oracular: (Installed: 4.98-1ubuntu1)
    triage-oracular+24.10: /etc/logrotate.d$ grep log exim4-*
    exim4-base:/var/log/exim4/mainlog /var/log/exim4/rejectlog {
    exim4-paniclog:/var/log/exim4/mainlog /var/log/exim4/rejectlog {

However, looking through the Debian exim4 delta from 4.97-5 to 4.98-1, nothing obvious is popping out. Indeed, the same dh_installlogrotate overrides are being done, and the /usr/bin/dh_installlogrotate script has not changed. However it looks pretty evident that it is copying the exim4-base's logrotate config instead of the one for exim4-paniclog. It really looks like perhaps debhelper has changed behavior for the way the --name option is handled by dh_installlogrotate.

Digging through debhelper's changelog, I spotted this change:
    https://salsa.debian.org/debian/debhelper/-/commit/a16a181f2f141c8ae6b8101ee530fff7a67cfc78

It sounds like that is disabling some behavior for the --name option for tools generally, and added overrides for specific tools that need it. However, dh_installlogrotate is not one of the updated tools in that changeset. Perhaps it should be?

Other packages that may be affected include (but not limited to):

ipmitool
nginx
syslogng

The issue was indeed the change to debhelper. In a PPA, I modified it to allow --name for dh_installlogrotate, and then rebuilt exim4 against that. Upgrading exim4 to the rebuilt version then correctly installed the rotate config:

/var/log/exim4/paniclog {
        size 10M
        missingok
        rotate 10
        compress
        delaycompress
        notifempty
        nocreate
}

So, for fixing this it looks like the fixed logrotate will need to be posted to the archive, and then once it's built in -proposed, update exim4 to require that version as a built depends and upload that as well.

No SRU will be necessary since the debhelper change was only introduced to oracular. However, any other packages besides exim4 that also rely on installing logrotate with --name will also need rebuilt.

This bug was fixed in the package debhelper - 13.18ubuntu2

---------------
debhelper (13.18ubuntu2) oracular; urgency=medium

  * dh_installlogrotate: Re-added 'named' pkgfile's in compat 14+ to
    enable --name for log rotate.
    (LP: #2077407)

 -- Bryce Harrington <email address hidden> Wed, 11 Sep 2024 00:21:43 -0700

This bug was fixed in the package exim4 - 4.98-1ubuntu2

---------------
exim4 (4.98-1ubuntu2) oracular; urgency=medium

  * No-change rebuild against debhelper 13.18ubuntu2 from -proposed
    (LP: #2077407)

 -- Bryce Harrington <email address hidden> Sun, 15 Sep 2024 13:41:05 -0700