Re: dpkg reassembly of split packages, when to purge
On Mon, 11 Sep 1995, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
> Bill Mitchell writes:
> >On Sun, 10 Sep 1995, Ian Jackson wrote:
>
> >> [...], should I do a full cleanup at some point in dpkg or
> >> dselect's operation ? At boot time ?
> [...]
> >> Note that the parts of the package have to be kept by dpkg between
> >> invocations, [...]
> >
> >I'd say clean out any leftover package fragments on exiting dselect.
> >[...]
>
> [...] When they exit dselect the next thing they probably do
> is go and get good copies of the missing parts - they don't want to
> return to find dselect has automatically deleted all the stuff they
> already had.
I took Ian's question to be referring to copies kept by dpkg -- not
to files which the user furnished dselect as input. I agree that
neither dselect nor dpkg should go deleting the user's downloaded
files.
> (Basing it on anything to do with dselect also doesn't work with those
> users who prefer to use dpkg in the raw.)
True. I think the more cooked situation with dselect makes it
appropriate for dselect to delete package fragments. The rawer
(and fragment-oriented rather than package-oriented) situation
with dpkg requires that dpkg keep fragments around.
Perhaps I'm presuming too much about dselect, though. My presumption
is that if package-1.0-1 comes fragmented in 50 .deb files, dselect
will deal with it in user interaction as package-1.0-1, and not
as the 50 separate fragments. I could be wrong in that presumption.
> Doing it at boot time has the same problem: if they are getting Debian
> over a net connection e.g. at work then it's perfectly believable that
> they shut their machine down while at work. Imagine the frustration
> on turning the machine on after a tiring day and the first thing it
> does is delete those precious files! [...]
Again, I don't think Ian was proposing deleting the user's downloaded
files. I think he was talking about copies of package fragment files
cached by dpkg awaiting dpkg invocation to unpack the fragment which
would complete the package.
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