Re: mucking with dpkg control files in maintainer scripts?

[Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de>]

Ian Jackson <ian@davenant.greenend.org.uk> writes:

> Frank Küster writes ("Re: mucking with dpkg control files in maintainer scripts?"):
>> 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?
>
> Yes, exactly.  (You only get to inspect the state, not modify it, for
> obvious reasons.)
>
> But: if you find yourself doing this you're probably doing something
> wrong.
>
> Ian.

Isn't it more accurate to say that the dpkg database is transaction
based? Changes are recorded on the fly in updates and then commited
attomically when the transaction is finished.

And dpkg honors the updates log when being called again while
maintainer scripts poking around in the status file will not.

MfG
        Goswin