Re: mucking with dpkg control files in maintainer scripts?
Ian Jackson <ian@davenant.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
> Frank Küster writes ("Re: mucking with dpkg control files in maintainer scripts?"):
>> I think the main reason why this is not being done is that there's a
>> general fear that calling "dpkg -s" from a script that has been called
>> by dpkg might give unpredictable, or at least not the desired results.
>
> If you need this information, dpkg -s is a better way to get it than
> messing around with /var/lib/dpkg - but see my earlier message.
>
> Messing with conffiles is _very complicated_ and doing so by hand in
> maintscripts is likely to produce more subtle and complicated bugs
> rather than fewer bugs.
>
>> If it were documented how dpkg behaves under such circumstances (same
>> for "dpkg -l"), people might be willing to change this.
>
> Where is this documentation you refer to ?
It is nowhere AFAIK, and this is the problem.
> dpkg -s and dpkg -l are
> equally reliable in this respect.
In other words, "commits" to the dpkg database are atomic, and if dpkg
is called from a script started by dpkg, it will report all packages in
the correct, current and maybe partial state, including the package
processed so far?
Regards, Frank
--
Dr. Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)
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