Hi, On 5/8/23 20:38, Luca Boccassi wrote: [local diversions]
Sure, they are supported in the sense that they can be enabled, and then you get to keep the pieces.
They are supported in the sense that someone actually added an explicit flag for dpkg-divert for specifically this feature and documented it in the manual page as an interface.
Maintainer scripts don't need to work around the admin installing arbitrary incompatible tools, because we generally expect admins to know what they are doing -- however requiring admins to perform multiple diversion registrations to have them count is a change of the interface.
The /bin/sh diversion is a bit ...special. This should have been an alternative, but cannot be because /bin/sh needs to be functional after unpacking Essential packages, so maintainer scripts work during bootstrap.
There is an interesting use case here as well, bootstrapping a foreign architecture, where we only unpack the Essential set, divert /sbin/init to /sbin/init.real and place a shell script as /sbin/init that completes the installation once the resulting tree is mounted as a root filesystem on the target platform. It has been a while since I used that, in principle this should even still work with systemd.
Simon