On Mon, 08 Mar 2010, Brian Nelson wrote:
> Don Armstrong <don@debian.org> writes:
> > So there's a period on upgrade where the file has been overwritten
> > with an file before the new file has been generated?
> >
> > That's just wrong.
>
> Why? Considering the old hash file may be invalid anyway after
> you've upgraded other related packages (the aspell dict ones are
> format-dependent on the aspell version),
If this is actually a problem,[1] you can remove it in your preinst in
those specific cases. As it is now, any reinstall or upgrade of this
package will break these files for a period of time, even if there
aren't any actual changes to the format.
> why would it matter that the hash file is temporarily empty?
Because anything that expects to be able to use it would stop being
able to until the postinst is run successfully, which could be many
minutes on a long install.
It may not be much of a problem in this specific case, but it's
certainly not the way to solve this problem in general.
Don Armstrong
1: The aspell dict files have a format specifier in the front, so
presumably anyting that is consuming them will check them before
blindly using them, and hopefully fail with an informative error
message if necessary.
--
The smallest quantity of bread that can be sliced and toasted has yet
to be experimentally determined. In the quantum limit we must
necessarily encounter fundamental toast particles which the author
will unflinchingly designate here as "croutons".
-- Cser, Jim. Nanotechnology and the Physical Limits of Toastability.
AIR 1:3, June, 1995.
http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu