Re: [SE/Linux] status / progress report 13jun2004
On Sun, 13 Jun 2004 15:36:48 +0000, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
[...]
>
> The major outstanding issues are:
>
[...]
>
> * a decision needs to be made on dpkg either to accept the postinst.d
> idea or come up with a workable alternative. decision appears to be
> held up because people "don't like the idea of selinux" rather than for
> any genuine technical reason.
>
> "alternative" patched dpkg package that provide the postinst.d
> functionality will be made available "ad infinitum" until a decision is
> made.
>
[...]
>
> dpkg:
>
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=249496
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-dpkg/2002/03/msg00154.html
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2002/03/msg02063.html
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-dpkg/2004/05/msg00255.html
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2004/06/msg00698.html
>
> status: mr russell coker's postinst.d patch is apparently
> well-known and the bugreport has been merged with
> other bugs, one of which (#17243) dates back to 1998! kuudosss.
> however, the maintainer says that those bugs are part of a larger
> picture of required / requested functionality and they don't want to
> proceed with what would turn out to be a temporary measure.
>
> 30may2004: after evaluating options (see links above) initiated thread
> to convince dpkg developers to incorporate postinst.d patch.
>
> 13jun2004: no response yet received, another ping initiated.
>
[...]
Wow. This sounds like a horrible idea. The fact that rpm does it,
doesn't make it any better; I've had redhat machines that corrupt their
rpm database every 3 or 4 rpm installs/upgrades (let's hear it for
libdb4).
If I understand the proposed patch correctly, a package installs a
postinst script that is run w/ every installed package's postinst script.
If this postinst script breaks, it makes every package on the system
uninstallable. Please tell me that this isn't the case. If the postinst
script takes a while to run, this significantly slows down installation of
all packages. This scheme is just begging for abuse by a maintainer.
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