Re: RPM (Was Re: Deity project schedule problems)

[Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu>]

Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@datasync.com> writes:

> 	The problem I have with this is that we are shelving the
>  responsibility to the individual maintainers. I am loth to make any
>  policy without at least a detailed example (or a skeltal script that
>  does this). Also, the examples should probably not only be in Perl,
>  we need to provide shell script examples as well.

Well, my opinion is that cfgtool might do everything that we want, but
the most general solution might be to do what was suggested before and
add a "config" script to the packaging system that's run in a batch
with all the other config scripts for a given dpkg/dselect run.  Then
we need to amend the policy file to include two items:

  1) a mandate that no interactive questions should be asked outside
     the config script.

  2) a note that the directory /var/lib/dpkg/tmp.config/<packagename>
     (or whatever) will be available, *empty*, and reserved for
     packages to store any information needed between config and
     install script time. (This, of course requires a small (?) bit of
     dpkg hackery).

Then just as with the package build helper tools, we could have
runtime configuration tools (like cfgtool) to make the job of
collecting the configuration information easier for simple (the
majority) of cases, but maintainers could fall back on whatever means
were needed for more difficult tasks.

One argument above is that we really need to provide skeletal sample
config scripts before embarking on this, but while I think that would
be quite nice, I don't think it's necessary.  Consider the fact that
maintainers have already managed quite well to collect the information
they need with shell and perl hackery up to now.

Perhaps this is a lame idea, but it seemed to be simple to implement
and flexible enough to do whatever we want.
-- 
Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu>
PGP fingerprint = E8 0E 0D 04 F5 21 A0 94  53 2B 97 F5 D6 4E 39 30


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