Re: Essentialness of awk
On Sat, Sep 28, 2002 at 01:53:58PM +0200, Santiago Vila wrote:
> > > I was going to propose a patch against the current policy document,
> > > but there is a little problem:
> > > Since dpkg will not prevent upgrading of other packages while an
> > > essential package is in an unconfigured state, all essential packages
> > > must supply all of their core functionality even when unconfigured. If
> > > the package cannot satisfy this requirement it must not be tagged as
> > > essential, and any packages depending on this package must instead
> > > have explicit dependency fields as appropriate.
> > Given that a /usr/bin/awk link is made available as part of the initial
> > install, I don't think there's any way of it becoming unavailable even
> > though alternatives are used.
> Exactly, but still none of the awk packages will work when unconfigured
> (before they are bootstrapped), as policy seems to forbid.
I don't really see what relevance policy has to bootstrapping in that
sense; I mean, dpkg is unpacked before libc6 (they're done alphabetically
initially, iirc) which violates a pre-depends, eg. Even essential packages
are allowed to assume /usr/bin/awk works before they're installed,
that the mawk and gawk packages happen to assume that fact in order to
ensure that /usr/bin/awk continues working while they're unpacked is no
great problem.
> > # dpkg --install bash_Y*.deb foo*.deb
> > bash Y is unpacked over the top of bash X; /bin/sh is removed if present
> > since it's no longer in the package
> > foo's #!/bin/sh preinst script is run, it dies horribly, dpkg aborts
> Indeed, but bash version Y (>X) which does not provide /bin/sh in the .deb
> is, in some way, a step backwards as far as bootstrapping is concerned.
It's no big deal either way.
Cheers,
aj
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred.
``If you don't do it now, you'll be one year older when you do.''
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