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Re: Install-info transition, review time



On Thu, 26 Mar 2009 00:34:23 -0700
Steve Langasek <vorlon@debian.org> wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 07:21:15AM +0000, Neil Williams wrote:
> > > Also, is the new dpkg going to Pre-Depend: on this new install-info package?
> > > If not, what does this /usr/sbin/install-info wrapper script do when called
> > > and /usr/bin/install-info is absent?  Packages currently call install-info
> > > from their maintainer scripts unconditionally, because it's provided by an
> > > Essential package.
> 
> > Triggers will replace such maintainer script calls,
> 
> Not instantaneously!  This needs to include a sane transition plan.  "Don't
> worry, we'll use triggers" is not.

Sorry, didn't mean to infer that the change from maintainer scripts to
triggers was to be instantaneous across all affected packages, just
trying to give some context for the reasons behind the change. IIRC,
the /usr/sbin/install-info wrapper was to do nothing (except maybe a
warning) if /usr/bin/install-info was not present as the work should be
being done by the info package.

Some info documents need to be fixed to work with GNU install info to
allow the current workload of the dpkg install-info to be offloaded to
a later stage when ginstall-info (the GNU version) exists and processes
whatever files it finds in the appropriate location.

i.e. the dpkg install-info is currently doing more than it needs to do
and would be restricted to simply doing what the package maintainer
would need to do for trigger support - move the files into the relevant
location for ginstall-info to process later.

> > IIRC the remaining install-info script is to provide support until all
> > the packages using maintainer scripts calls migrate to using triggers
> > for their info documents.
> 
> Which means install-info must be reliably present on the system until that
> transition is finished.  Which means dpkg needs to Pre-Depend on
> install-info.

My expectation was that dpkg would provide a script to allow existing
maintainer scripts to complete without error but not necessarily action
the info document indexing at that time - simply moving files around.
Once the info browser is installed, it would build the database it
needs. I may be wrong but IIRC, once the info documents are fixed to be
compatible with ginstall-info, the dpkg script actually called by the
current maintainer scripts doesn't actually need to do anything other
than move files to where they should be placed (a role to be taken on
by the packages themselves as trigger support is implemented in each
one) and then allow the info browser package to deal with generating
the metadata that is currently done at a much earlier stage. There
would then be no need to have dpkg pre-depend on install-info (just as
it does not pre-depend on man-db).

I hope I've got that right, Raphael?

-- 


Neil Williams
=============
http://www.data-freedom.org/
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/
http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/

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