Re: Informative addendum to policy clarifying dpkg/maintainer script interface
On Wed, Oct 21 2009, Frank Küster wrote:
> Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I have created a document to clarify the interaction between
>> maintainer scripts and dpkg, and examines the state changes for a
>> package when a user interacts with the packaging system.
>
> Thank you, that looks very useful. What I'm missing, however, is any
> reference to debconf's config script. Isn't that called by dpkg, too?
Hmm. There are three different ways the config script is called,
one is (for apt version 0.5 or above) via /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/70debconf
-- this calls dpkg-preconfigure (8) to do to preconfigure the packages
it is trying to install. That is beyond the scope of the document,
since it is just an external program (apt) calling dpkg-preconfigure;
and no package state change happens here -- this is just a debconf db
update thing.
The second way is when you initiate debconf/confmodule in your
postinst, then debconf tries to call the config script again; this
activity is thus part of what the postinst does, and not something this
document covers (since we do not say anything about what maintainer
scripts do or not do, just how they are called and what they return).
Thirdly, if you call dpkg-reconfigure, the config script is run,
but, again, this document is not documenting dpkg-reconfigure (or
dpkg-preconfigure). As far asI can see, dpkg-preconfigure also doe
snot cause a package state transition, it just runs the scripts
(prerm. config, postinst).
Could the dpkg folks chine in if I am wrong?
manoj
--
Bugs, pl. n.: Small living things that small living boys throw on small
living girls.
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>
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