Re: Lengthy Debian install procedures

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

Ben Armstrong <synrg@sanctuary.nslug.ns.ca> writes:

> are there good reasons these tasks cannot be backgrounded so the
> install can go on without them?

The only way to do this right would be for dpkg to support a
"dselect-post-run-hook".  This would benefit menu, tex, and others
too.  I couldn't think of any other reasonable way to handle this,
although some of these concerns become less of an issue once we have
the ability to ask all the "questions up front" during an install.
Then the recompiles become less obtrusive.

However, to avoid multiple menu runs, multiple Tex recompiles and even
a few extra emacs related byte compiles, while still being technically
correct, we need something like a dselect-post-run-hook.

For example, I can't use the menu "delay until after dpkg finishes"
method in emacsen-common because the the dselect run could finish,
then emacsen-common could notice that and start byte-compiling
everything in the background like menu does.  But what happens if the
user then immediately decides that they forgot something and re-runs
dpkg or dselect.  In this run, they could purge packages that the
still-running background emacsen-common is working on, resulting in
*serious* potential problems.

-- 
Rob Browning <rlb@cs.utexas.edu> PGP=E80E0D04F521A094 532B97F5D64E3930