Re: perlconfig in postinst: opinion please...
Bruce wrote:
> [...]
>Hopefully placing "perl" in the "half-installed" state will force
>the user to install it before any other packages, but the alternative would be
>to place a dependency on the perl package in packages that loaded perl headers
>in their preinst or postinst.
There are two stages to installation: unpacking and configuration.
The preinst script gets run *before* unpacking, and *without regard to
dependencies*. This is necessary to avoid having to unpack the
packages in a particular order.
The postinst script gets run during configuration, and here dpkg
*does* ensure that packages which the current one depends on are
unpacked and configured first. (Modulo some subtlety if there are
circular dependencies.)
If the Perl headers are not part of the base disks themselves then no
packages at all should use them in their preinst scripts. Postinst
scripts are fine, provided they declare a dependency.
(Neither of these things are true of auto-pgp: it only needs Perl
headers or modules at run-time, so a simple dependency would be fine,
and it would work without.)
Ian.
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