Re: installer for non-free packages in contrib
On Tue, Sep 09, 2003 at 11:06:53AM -0600, Bruce Sass wrote:
> On Tue, 9 Sep 2003, Colin Watson wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 09, 2003 at 01:24:07AM -0600, Bruce Sass wrote:
> > > On Mon, 8 Sep 2003, Colin Watson wrote:
> > > > * installs that package in such a way that it's registered in dpkg's
> > > > database
> > >
> > > do the install in the background when the dpkg DB area is unlocked
> >
> > Yuck! Please, no! Error handling? Error reporting? Reproducibility?
>
> I agree the "Yuck!" factor is kinda high.
>
> Why would error handling be affected; it is not like some automatic
> error handling mechanism is being bypassed. Reporting would need to
> be via email or a log, not realtime by why should that matter?
I suppose that's possible, noting that the installer might be for qmail
which would mean that your MTA might not be configured. You can't cause
errors in the sub-install to fail the configuration of the parent
package properly, though.
> I don't know what you mean by "Reproducibility?"... installing should
> do the same thing everytime irregardless of whether it is done by a
> script or manually from the command line.
Consider the case of installing two such packages in the same run. In
what order are the sub-installs done? What if one of the sub-packages
depends on the other?
Life is much simpler if everything happens synchronously, and up to now
we've by and large been able to do that when installing packages, with
the minor exception of update-menus working around the lack of hooks.
> Does your lack of quoting or comment on the rest of the post mean you
> don't see a problem with those parts of the scheme?
I'm not convinced, but I didn't have time to read those parts in detail
and therefore didn't attempt to respond to them.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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