Hi!
On Thu, 2022-02-10 at 10:34:36 -0700, Lance Fredrickson wrote:
I've noticed that installing a self created package to a non-FHS compliant
directory will the give the message "dpkg: warning: while removing directory
/usr/local not empty so not removed" upon removal of the package. Where in
the source code does it list these FHS compliant directories? I'm compiling
dpkg for a personal project and would like to modify the list of directories
that dpkg thinks are FHS compliant.
dpkg has no built-in knowledge about any filesystem layout (and it will
be kept that way). What you are seeing is those pathnames not being
owned by any package, although they are created (at least on Debian
and derivatives) by the base-files package maintainer scripts:
$ dpkg-query --control-show base-files postinst
In the future this might be fixable, once dpkg can support for
packages to declare a pathname to be created by allowing for it to be
removed, which is the main reason (AFAIR) that base-files is not
shipping them in the .deb as is usual.
For now your alternatives are to ship the files under /usr instead of
/usr/local (as that's supposed to be the location for manually handled
files by local admins, or at least that's how I interpret it), and
dpkg should be able to protect against file collisions anyway, and if
you have those already then what is being used will depend on
precedence given by specific callers or environment settings. Or perhaps
create some kind of base-something packages, that ships those pathnames,
but once/if you remove it you'll get the same warnings.
Thanks,
Guillem