Package: debian-policy
Version: 3.6.1.0
Severity: wishlist
Policy 6.6 describing argumntsx given to "postinst configure" contains
this paragraph:
| If there is no most recently configured version dpkg will pass a null
| argument; older versions of dpkg may pass <unknown> (including the
| angle brackets) in this case. Even older ones do not pass a second
| argument at all, under any circumstances.
As dpkg used "<unknown>" only up to version 1.2.0 (released May 1996),
supporting "<unknown>" in maintainerscripts serves no practical
purpose anymore, installing a fairly recent (even from potato) package
on such an ancient system would probably fail for other reasons (e.g.
dependencies).
I therefore I propose to clearly mark this as obsolete, as in "Don't
bother to implement if you have to write a new postinst-script." by
moving it into a footnote.
There was some initial discussion about this issue on debian-devel,
starting with
Date: Sun, 7 Sep 2003 10:23:15 -0500
From: Branden Robinson <branden@debian.org>
Subject: Re: /etc/shells management
Message-ID: <20030907152315.GS2687@deadbeast.net>
resulting in this suggested wording (courtesy of Daniel Martin):
--------------------------
--- CVS/debian-policy/policy.sgml Sat Aug 23 22:23:53 2003
+++ policy.sgml Tue Sep 9 17:27:00 2003
@@ -3648,10 +3648,18 @@
<p>
If there is no most recently configured version
- <prgn>dpkg</prgn> will pass a null argument; older versions
- of dpkg may pass <tt><unknown></tt> (including the
- angle brackets) in this case. Even older ones do not pass a
- second argument at all, under any circumstances.
+ <prgn>dpkg</prgn> will pass a null argument.
+ <footnote>
+ <p>
+ Historical note: Truly ancient (pre-1997) versions of
+ <prgn>dpkg</prgn> passed <tt><unknown></tt> (including
+ the angle brackets) in this case. Even older ones did not
+ pass a second argument at all, under any circumstance. Note
+ that upgrades using such an old dpkg version are unlikely to
+ work for other reasons, even if this old argument behavior
+ is handled by your postinst script.
+ </p>
+ </footnote>
</p>
</sect>
--------------------------
hth, cu andreas
-- System Information
Debian Release: 3.0
Architecture: i386
Kernel: Linux downhill 2.4.21acpi #1 Son Jun 15 20:21:21 CEST 2003 i686
Locale: LANG=de_AT, LC_CTYPE=de_AT
Versions of packages debian-policy depends on:
ii fileutils 4.1-10 GNU file management utilities
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