Re: Repost: RFC and preliminary RFS: prayer webmail

[Justin Pryzby <justinpryzby@users.sourceforge.net>]

On Sat, Mar 10, 2007 at 08:05:55PM +0100, Magnus Holmgren wrote:

> Something I've been thinking about:
> 
> If two packages share a /var/(lib|run|log) subdirectory, how do you know when
> to remove it? I reckon that it should be removed when the last of the
> packages has been purged. Both packages place files there at runtime, so dpkg
> won't remove it since it's nonempty. But you can't just remove it in postrm
> if it's empty. Do you:
> 
>  a) leave it alone; let root delete it manually when it's no longer needed
>  b) use dpkg -S to see if it's still in use
>  c) use dpkg -l to see if the other package is still installed
>  d) avoid sharing directories under /var
>  e) do something else?
The easy thing to do is to include it in the package, rather than
creating it in maintainer scripts.  Then dpkg leaves it alone if another
package also includes (and in recent releases may even succeed in not
warning you).  I think there are cases where it is advantageous not to
include it, but they don't occur to me presently..

Justin