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Re: NEVER remove log files without asking



Matthew Palmer <mpalmer@debian.org> writes:
> Wesley J Landaker wrote:
>> Richard Kettlewell wrote:
>>> Steve Greenland <steveg@moregruel.net> writes:

>>> Perhaps life would be improved by having a way to easily discover
>>> what --purge would remove without actually running it (or reading
>>> the relevant maintainer script).  You already get this for
>>> conffiles, which are a subset of the answer; it could be extended
>>> to other things removed by --purge.
>> 
>> It seems like 'dpkg --dry-run --purge package' would be a great place 
>> for this to happen. Currently, it just says:
> 
> That would require somehow knowing that every maintainer script will
> honour such a request before doing the "dry run", retrofitting that
> would suck pretty hard.  Policy versions might be a help, but I'd be
> a bit twitchy about it.
> 
> Either that or more metadata needs to be stuffed into every package
> saying exactly what it will do at various stages for dpkg to
> process.

Only packages with a postrm can remove any extra files in a purge, so
only packages with a postrm would need any extra metadata (perhaps a
new maintainer script that knew how to output the information).  Still
quite a lot but better than "every package".

During the (lengthy) transition period dpkg would have to report
"don't know" for packages with a postrm but without any way to
determine the extra information.

-- 
http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/



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