When upgrading the Hudson Debian package the "postinst" script in the Debian package tries to use "chown" and "chmod" to set ownership and permissions on files under ~hudson. But the script follows symlinks, so it can run chown/chmod on any file outside of the ~hudson directory tree. On my Hudson server machine we have a symlink to the root directory of the machine (i.e. to "/"). That the Hudson upgrade results in changes to "/" is really bad.

The problematic lines in "postinst" seem to be:

find /var/lib/hudson -path "*jobs" -prune -o -exec chown hudson:adm {} +

and

find /var/lib/hudson -path "jobs" -prune -o -path ".ssh" -prune -o -exec chmod 750 {} +

Adding a "! -type l" in the right place should solve the immediate problem (see the attachment for regular a patch). But I wonder if it is a good idea to modify the files under the ~hudson user in the this way at all.