Re: New ncurses packages...
David Engel writes ("Re: New ncurses packages..."):
...
> However, I will say
> that the biggest problem area is the allowing of packages to remain in
> an unpacked but unconfigured state (i.e. the old package has been
> removed but the postinst for the new one has not yet been run) for an
> indefinite period of time. Perhaps this feature should be removed for
> essential packages.
I don't think this is the problem. Remember that if we *ever* let
the system get into a broken state we might find that something goes
wrong at a bad moment and then we're stuck. So, we need to make sure
that the system is never so broken that it can't recover, and so we
need to make sure that essential packages which are merely unpacked
and not configured are sufficiently un-broken to support the rest of
the installation procedure.
Hence Pre-Depends, which will prevent you from unpacking a non-working
essential package over the top of a working one.
> Another problem area is the ordering of calls to
> the postrm and postinst scripts. I'm at a loss for a good example
> right now, but some problems could be more easily solved if the postrm
> for the old package were called after the postinst for the new
> package.
That will break lots of things which use install-info, update-rc.d,
&c, because they often add things in the postinst and remove them in
the postrm without thinking about their arguments.
Ian.
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