Re: How to create .deb package with volatile files

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

Hi!

First of all, you might want to disable HTML mail (I fished this out
of my spam mail box). Second, this is probably more a material for the
debian-mentors mailing list, but anyway.

On Wed, 2013-09-18 at 10:44:58 +0530, prashant tyagi wrote:
> How can we create .deb packages with volatile file. A volatile file is a
> file whose content may change after installation.

Assuming we are not talking about any kind of cache, log or similar.
There's three main options:

1) Ship an initial file that gets modified later on, but this will
   make the file hashes not match with stuff like debsums or the
   upcoming «dpkg --verify». While this might be the most convenient
   option I think it's just wrong.
2) Do not ship the file, and generate it at installation time, or
   run-time or whenever, but you'll have to deal with the removal
   manually in the maintainer scripts. This is the more correct but
   slightly more cumbersome option.
3) If the volatile file changes are due to external forces, like
   updates from a website or similar, then it might be best to
   automatically generate a new package every time these files
   change, and ship them normally in a repository package.

In the future, dpkg might adquire the ability to register external
files, and one kind of such files could be changing files, so dpkg would
take care of removing them, and would not store file hashes, etc.

> I could not find any documentation regarding volatile file in .deb package.

I'll update the FAQ.

Thanks,
Guillem