Re: proposal: "debian/purge"

[Alexandre Detiste <alexandre.detiste@gmail.com>]

This mail about "...a declarative way to express..."* remind me of my proposal

[*] https://lists.debian.org/debian-dpkg/2015/02/msg00028.html .

I guess a general answer would be to go declarative all the way for
the common cases.


2014-12-06 15:05 GMT+01:00 Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>:
>>
>> This is a new, scaled down proposal: https://wiki.debian.org/Cruft/purge
>> that basicaly propose to turn the most easy cases of
>>
>> > #debian/postrm
>> > if [ "$1" = "purge" ]; then
>> >        rm -f /var/lib/somefile
>> > fi
>> into machine-readable files that only contains the paths
>>
>
> Hmm, most (if not all) of the examples you list are configuration
> files, those should be integrated into dpkg as maintainer-managed
> "conffiles".

This would still be usefull for all the dynamic stuff in /var/{spool |
cache | lib | log }
that get handled by a "rm -rf / var/<dir>/<package>" in postrm.

> But in any case, your proposal seems like a partial
> fix for what should be the proper solution, and asking maintainers
> to switch to something that will be changing implies making them
> do twice the work for something that is actually pretty trivial
> currently.

I can't help much here for now, still a bit "out of my league" for now.
But I guess the 2 mechanism (.purge & "dynamic config file database")
could co-exist, even if they may overlap in some cases.

I guess we don't want to patch every single software in the archive to
register every single file
it creates under /var in some database, so a "dynamic /var database"
would never happen.

> Sure, let me get 1.17.23 out of the way, and then I'll open up 1.18.x
> and start discussions around the above topics (where I'll gladly Cc
> you too, if you are not subscribed to the list).
Subscribed

Let's release Jessie :-)

I didn't CC: everyone of [*] mail, I guess the release team doesn't
need to know about this post-Jessie stuff.

Alexandre Detiste