Re: rm -rf /usr/somedir in maintainer scripts? (was: dpkg, symlinks, directories)

["Andrej N. Gritsenko" <andrej@rep.kiev.ua>]

    Hello!

I have written on Sunday, 30 September, at  2:12:
>Nikolaus Rath has written on Saturday, 29 September, at 18:56:
>>"Andrej N. Gritsenko" <andrej@rep.kiev.ua> writes:
>>> I've solved that in the
>>> preinst script by 'rm -rf /usr/include/libfm' and I thought yet that was
>>> a right step since upgrade 1.0.1 -> 1.0.2 went smooth.

>>Somehow that sounds like a really bad idea to me. Admittedly manually
>>placing some file in /usr/include/libfm is pretty ugly, but I would
>>still certainly not expect that upgrading the libfm package would remove
>>it.

>>Is that really good practice? Can packages "own" a directory, so that
>>anything that the local admin puts there may be removed automatically?

>    Probably I'm wrong in that. Do you think preinst script should fail
>instead if target-to-replace directory is not empty?

And that will not work certainly. If package is being upgraded then old
files will be still in place so rmdir will fail in any case.

Could you propose any better way to do then? Postinst script which does
rmdir and makes symlink instead of not-installed from package? Isn't it
dirty somehow?

    Andriy.