Re: Declarative packaging (Was: Re: Intended MBF: maintainer scripts not using strict mode)
On Thu, Jun 29, 2017 at 12:34 AM, Michael Biebl wrote:
> The common expectation in Debian is, that we expect packages to be
> "usable" after installation. Which means we often intermix installation
> with configuration, which is typically done via maintainer scripts.
>
> This makes it very hard to disentangle those steps.
We are re-implementing hacking around this entanglement in multiple
places (Debian Live, OpenStack images, cloud-init etc), but only for a
limited portion of the archive and only via manually munging the
filesystem after install.
This is also preventing us from having "OEM installs" where an
hardware vendor can create a generic disk image and each boot of that
image would run the necessary first-boot setup (like creating OpenSSH
keys or prompting to create users).
IIRC last time we discussed this, the recommendation was to set an
environment variable that maintainer scripts could check to determine
if they should do host-specific actions or just generic actions common
to all hosts. Personally I think that seems like a bit of a hack and
there needs to be a new state for packages to be in added to dpkg.
--
bye,
pabs
https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise
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