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Re: RFC: selective installs from a package



grendel@vip.net.pl (Marek Habersack) writes:

>   The idea is to enable the local administrator to create and maintain a
> database of files from packages that s/he doesn't ever want on their system.
> I imagine that dpkg would have to be augmented with a capability to use a
> hold flag on files that the admin banned from the system. The actual
> selection of files would be really easy - the admin deletes all the unwanted
> files, then runs some utility to investigate what files are missing from all
> the packages and record those in some database (/var/lib/dpkg/held-files??).
> Sure, there would be situations where one or antoher file deleted by
> accident would get into that database, but nothing's perfect. The admin
> would have the ability to scan only a specific package for deleted files, of
> course.
>
It would be quite nice if dpkg/apt could eventually check for a script
like e.g. "/usr/local/sbin/postinst.local", as adduser already does in
a similiar vein:

---------- man (8) adduser --------

       If  the file /usr/local/sbin/adduser.local exists, it will
       be executed after the user account  has  been  set  up  in
       order  to  do  any  local  setup. [...]

---------- man (8) adduser --------

This would contain whatever the local sysadmin would want to be done
after any package installation.  

But OTOH any local sysadmin could easily create a set of scripts which
call the usual installation routines and then afterwards the proposed
"/usr/local/sbin/postinst.local" stuff in just a single pass without
bloating dpkg/apt with further functionality, for which only a small
amount of admins might have any use for.  And since it's possible to
create such a routine in this way, why burden the dpkg/apt maintainers
with more code to maintain?  Modularity is the answer.

Maybe you (or anybody else interested in this matter) could just sit
down for a moment (or two or three ;) and create a new Debian package
for the admin section containing a suite of scripts for exactly this
purpose?
                               Thank you, P. *8^)
-- 
   ------------ Paul Seelig <pseelig@mail.uni-mainz.de> -------------
   African Music Archive - Institute for Ethnology and Africa Studies
   Johannes Gutenberg-University   -  Forum 6  -  55099 Mainz/Germany
   ------------------- http://ntama.uni-mainz.de --------------------



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