Re: Cruft update
On Sat, Sep 08, 2001 at 10:54:27PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 07, 2001 at 07:04:37PM -0700, Francois Gouget wrote:
> > At first sight it would seem logical to simply send a bug report
> > against cruft with all the updates but I think it would actually make
> > much more sense to send bug reports against each package so that *they*
> > and not cruft include these filter files. Here's why.
>
> Once upon a time, back when cruft was brand new, the idea was that
> packages should include a /var/lib/dpkg/info/foo.extrafiles-esque file
> that cruft would look at. This, naturally enough, was going to require
> a policy proposal and would hopefully get dpkg support (so dpkg -S
> /etc/passwd would give you useful information, and so something similar
> could happen for dpkg -L) and all would be rosy.
That sounds like a really good idea.
> Unfortunately, there was some debate about whether the format cruft uses
> (which has a special foo/** syntax for a * wildcard that matches /'s
> as well as normal characters) is okay, or whether a standard globbing
> system should've been used instead (I proposed what cruft currently uses,
> Ian Jackson said a standard globbing function'd be better). No conclusion
> ever got reached, the policy issue got lost when Christian Schwarz (sp?)
> resigned as policy editor, and everyone who cared got distracted.
Ah. Might be nice to resurrect it and see whether we can solve these
issues. The format cruft uses is much less relevant than the idea of
having such files; cruft can always be modified. I've long been
frustrated that it can be really hard to track down the origins of
certain files on the system.
> Things that all packages are meant to do should really be in
> -policy. That's policy's entire raison d'etre, after all.
Let's continue this on -policy.
Julian
--
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Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, Queen Mary, Univ. of London
Debian GNU/Linux Developer, see http://people.debian.org/~jdg
NEW: Visit http://www.helpthehungry.org/ to do just that
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