Hi Raphael, Guillem, Daniel,
Even though I agree with the standpoint of the dpkg developers that using triggers to modify package-installed files is something to avoid, I must side with the practical point introduced by the Fink core developers in that this is something that is not lightly fixed otherwise. The fact that whatever we do in the Fink software, the produced .debs should stay the same and .debs from months or years ago might still be used on users' machines, and we don't want to rebuild everything, means any process like this is probably best to run after installation for now (alas debsums). This is a totally unsatisfying dirty solution, but I propose any discussion to change it will be on the thread I just started on the fink-core list for 10.7; let's take this as a starting point for the rest of this thread.
There are other use cases to come up with to defend the idea of a glob-, regexp- or even just file extension-based trigger ("I want to do a virus scan on every .so library file", "I want every .pl file using #!/usr/bin/perl to use #!/usr/local/bin/perl as the interpreter", "I want to build an index for every HTML file with 'foo' in its name"), but I must admit those are all not my use cases. Nevertheless, do you think the feature would be an addition to dpkg? I'm asking specifically because I'm trying to, as Guillem nicely put it, reduce the delta we carry on dpkg -- writing a patch only to have it rejected upstream either increases this delta or is a sad waste of my time. If you think it wouldn't be a valuable addition, I'd rather invest some time in seeking other parts of our changes to the Debian tools to upstream :)
Thanks,
SjorsAttachment:
PGP.sig
Description: Dit deel van het bericht is digitaal ondertekend