On Tue, Mar 03, 2009 at 04:17:00PM +0200, Guillem Jover wrote:
> Introducing either a shell library or a non-integrated dpkg-conffile
> has a too high cost IMO. It will prompt maintainers to switch to it
> (when the annoying part is the initial introduction of the support,
> being there already on packages currently needing it), which they
> might then need to do again once we get a proper solution, and will
> mean having to carry a deprecated interface for a long time, or not
> be able to change the existing one. I'd rather work during this
> release cycle on improving the general conffile support.
Hi Guillem, thanks for the improvement proposal, I guess we are all
eager to beta test it :)
Nevertheless, I don't get your argument against the essential package
containing the shell snippet library. To me, it looks very much like
debhelper. We are used to release of it with new features adding the
proper versioned dependency to ensure we have the right debhelper.
Sure we have potentially to deal with pre-dependencies, is that the
problem you were thinking at? While in general pre-dependencies are
bad because they can induce loops, in this specific case they will
always be towards the package containing the shell library which, in a
sense, will be a leaf of the pre-dependency graph.
In principle, that package can be dpkg itself (as it was suggested by
Joey). Note how we regularly write down in release notes to first
upgrade dpkg and then go ahead with the rest of the upgrade. That
would trivially solve the usual pre-dependency potential issues.
We do have evidence that there exist several de facto patterns in
maintainer scripts which are just copy & pasted around. That is
bad(TM), having a place where to factorize them IMO is a must.
/me just trying to understand whether I'm missing something of the
global picture
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7
zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/
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