Re: mucking with dpkg control files in maintainer scripts?

[Tollef Fog Heen <tfheen@err.no>]

* sean finney 

| is this even remotely acceptable?  i had the impressions that packages
| must not assume the inner workings of dpkg.  but, i can't back this up
| with anything in policy from what i can tell, hence the posting of
| this question.

Before responding, please read the bug report (390823) mentioned in
the changelog.  Oh, and if we deem this unacceptable, please do
suggest a different way and file bugs on a lot of the archive,
including all doing stuff like:

[...]
        old_md5sum="`sed -n -e \"/^Conffiles:/,/^[^ ]/{\\\\' $CONFFILE'{s/.* //;p}}\" /var/lib/dpkg/status`"

[...]

in their postinst.  Other notable offenders are base-files, man-db,
dpkg, most of the X packages.  Not-so-well-known offenders include
watchdog and mordor.

In summary: It's the least harmful way to fix the problem, and other
maintainers have come to the same conclusion before.  If anybody has
less bad suggestions, please do chime in.

-- 
Tollef Fog Heen                                                        ,''`.
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are      : :' :
                                                                      `. `' 
                                                                        `-