Registering files at installtion time
Dear dpkg team,
Is there any recommended way to register files with dpkg, when these
files are created only during installation?
Background: Packages like pts-tetex-cm-super ship a large collection of
PostScript Type 1 fonts (about 60MB when installed). Compression with
gzip/bzip of these .pfb fonts doesn't work very well. There exists an
alternative representation, though, that can be compressed very well:
$ ls -l sfrm1000.*
-rw-r--r-- 1 ralf users 138204 2005-08-26 23:58 sfrm1000.pfb
-rw-r--r-- 1 ralf users 137661 2005-08-26 13:48 sfrm1000.pfb.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 ralf users 66150 2005-08-26 13:48 sfrm1000.t1c.gz
Storing the fonts in .t1c instead of .pfb format halfs the size of the
package, which would be quite nice to have. The problem is that most
programs don't understand the .t1c format. Therefore the fonts are
converted to .pfb format during installation. This of course means that
they are not under dpkg control. They could get overwritten by other
packages etc.
We discussed shipping empty dummy files which are overwritten at
installation time by the real fonts. That would mess up the md5sums,
though. One could probably omit shipping md5sums or ship the md5sums of
the resulting .pfb files instead of the md5sums of the dummy files. But
that looks like putting one bad hack on top of the other. Is there any
better way? TIA.
cheerio
ralf
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