On Tue, Aug 22, 2017 at 01:48:47PM -0700, Mike Miller wrote: > One thing that I have seen a lot of in Ubuntu, but not so much in > Debian, is a postinstall failure when the user has built and installed > octave under /usr/local, then later tries to upgrade or install octave > from the archive. > > By default, /usr/local/bin precedes /bin and /usr/bin in root's PATH, so > octave's postinstall will end up running /usr/local/bin/octave. > > In the typical scenario, postinstall fails with > > error: couldn't read directory /usr/local/share/octave/packages: No such file or directory > > and the package is left unconfigured. Users are told to delete > /usr/local/bin/octave and run apt-get -f install, problem solved. > > In a slightly more subtle case, I could imagine this silently > succeeding, but with the wrong instance of Octave, leaving all > apt-installed octave-foo packages unavailable when a user later runs > /usr/bin/octave. > > I know typically it is preferable to call commands by name and let PATH > do its job, but in this case, where we want to build the package cache > for a specific instance of Octave, maybe we should call /usr/bin/octave > explicitly? Thanks for raising this issue. Indeed, I think that we should call /usr/bin/octave from maintainer scripts (maybe leaving a comment reminding us why the /usr/bin/ part is needed). -- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ Sébastien Villemot ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Debian Developer ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ http://sebastien.villemot.name ⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ http://www.debian.org
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