Re: RPM (Was Re: Deity project schedule problems)
On Wed, Sep 24, 1997 at 01:07:44PM +0100, Enrique Zanardi wrote:
> What about configuration at install time? We can mandate that
> postinst scripts must not be interactive (it has been suggested
> already), there's no modification to dpkg needed, but do we want that?
We definitely don't. Answering all the questions before starting the
installation just doesn't work with our distributed package system. This
might be feasible for distributions like RedHat or SuSE which are
controlled by central authorities, but not for Debian.
Being able to provide default answers for the questions during installation
would be nice, however. This could be done rather easily by providing
standard tools to ask questions that have to be used by the
postinst-scripts. Every question would get a tag and all the questions and
their answers encountered during installation would be saved to a file.
Then you could use this file as a template for other installations and you
wouldn't have to answer all the same questions again.
It's about the same thing as "dpkg --get-selections" and "dpkg
--set-selections".
> That's a good point. Perhaps dpkg can be improved to reduce its startup
> time, at least for the more used features, like queries. What our dpkg
> gurus think about that?
It has already been suggested to dump the contents of /var/lib/dpkg/info
into a binary file that is used as a cache for the real files in
/var/lib/dpkg/info. This binary file could be read much faster than all the
individual files and it wouldn't have to be re-parsed every time you start
dpkg.
IIRC, this feature was put on hold until we have deity. Does anybody know
why?
Martin
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