On Thu, Dec 15, 2016 at 8:16 AM, Ian Jackson <
ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
> Anders Oleson writes ("Re: PATCH: dpkg: allow missing /etc/dpkg/dpkg.d directory"):
>> But they expressed a desire to upstream patches (in general), so I
>> thought I'd see what you thought. If don't-care/don't fail was acceptable,
>> then why not start the discussion there.
>
> I wanted to reply to this. I absolutely encourage you to come and try
> to upstream your patches. You will get the benefit of our orneriness
> about error handling :-). By which I meank people like me can give
> you advice on how to solve your practical problems in a more robust
> way.
Actually I agree with 100% of all of this. It isn't good for anyone to have the baked in paths reused - it's not supposed to be that way.
So the first question was just whether we actually *want* to check the errors that way - asked and answered. No surprises really. I independently debated nearly all the same points with myself.
>
> And we will hopefully get the benefit of your code contribution.
> So, thanks.
>
> Regards,
> Ian.
Either way the best long term option would be to make dpkg support floating around in sysroots without hardcoded paths baked in. My thoughts exactly on if we had an override, we would set the baked-in paths to something neutral and illegal same as you suggested to catch stuff like this. I don't like peoples names floating around baked into executables either even if only used for the cross-build.
The biggest help would be to get design guidance. I know Yocto passes --instdir and --admindir. If we were to add a --sysroot or a --configdir option at a high level where would we need to touch? There are multiple executables, perl is involved somewhere, etc. etc. What has to be considered? What should get touched?
I am not a frequent contributor, but I am an experienced developer and user of many open source tools and I maintain, debug and hack on them internally quite a lot. And lurk vs. post mostly too. It is rare to actually find something that is actually worth sending upstream, e.g. not so specific or not already fixed, etc. But the point is that both Yocto and dpkg are of huge value to me and my way of saying thanks is to offer to pitch in when I do find something. Give me a few hints and I'll take this on.
If that goes OK, in addition, I can probably look at the other patches that Yocto is applying. They have a system where the have a list of patches that are applied during the build. See:
http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/poky/tree/meta/recipes-devtools/dpkg/dpkgThanks!
>
> --
> Ian Jackson <
ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk> These opinions are my own.
>
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fyvzl.net or @
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