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Re: Packages that download/install unsecured files



On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 09:26:38PM +0200, Christoph Anton
Mitterer wrote:
> 2) Package installation already downloads something and
> installs this e.g. some font packages (msttcorefonts) or
> documentations (susv2/3) do this.

Personally I dislike this mode of operation. I don't like
lots of code running in postinsts as root to perform e.g.
downloads (examples: flashplugin-nonfree) and subsequent
processing (unpacking, running shell scripts, etc.). In
addition you don't get the size of the downloaded blobs as
part of your package's Install-Size and in many cases in
the past its been possible to have the package marked as
installed correctly despite it not actually working.

In the case of flashplugin-nonfree I frequently hit a
problem where it would invoke wget which would wait for a
long time for network timeouts, stalling the upgrade
process, due to a non-defined http_proxy environment
variable in my session's context.

I tried to solve this problem for game data at least using
"game-data-packager", which is designed after
"java-package", which was (at the time I looked) the only
tool which I thought approached the problem in a sane way.


-- 
Jon Dowland

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