Re: Debian Configuration Packaging System

[Tim Abbott <tabbott@MIT.EDU>]

I'll note that we wrap our dpkg-divert calls with a bunch of 
error-handling code that we found quite important for correctly recovering 
from people hitting ^C in the middle of installation (see 
<http://debathena/config-packages/code/config-package-dev-4.2/divert.sh.in> 
for the code).  Earlier iterations that did not do this were plagued with 
problems whenever there were errors in installation.

We also ran into a few packages which will overwrite configuration files 
that they manage via debconf, overwriting our symlink every time the 
relevant package is upgraded.  But I think that's a bug in those Debian 
packages, since the same problem would occur for any manual changes to 
those configuration files as well (I think in the cases I've seen it is a 
failure to check whether an upgrade is occuring when generating the 
configuration file in postinst).

What other problems have you experienced?

	-Tim Abbott

On Sun, 24 Feb 2008, Russ Allbery wrote:

> Timothy G Abbott <tabbott@MIT.EDU> writes:
>
> > Anders Kaseorg and I created a system of CDBS modules (which we've
> > tentatively packaged as the config-package-dev package) for creating
> > Debian configuration packages.  By configuration packages, we mean
> > packages that configure an existing Debian system by applying
> > dpkg-divert to configuration files.  Our configuration package system
> > makes the process of creating configuration packages efficient.
>
> It's generally accepted wisdom that dpkg-divert doesn't work properly with
> configuration files and isn't safe.  I admit to have done something
> similar in the past, but I have noticed odd things that didn't matter for
> my particular use, but which meant that the support didn't work right.
> That's likely to be an issue for a general package.  Fixing dpkg-divert to
> work correctly with configuration files (if possible) would probably be a
> good idea.
>
> --
> Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
>
>
> --
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