Bug#215549: Why should the postinst care if it is being confiugured or reconfigured?

[Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de>]

sean finney <seanius@debian.org> writes:

> On Thu, Jul 02, 2009 at 09:44:50AM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
>>         The question is, why should we change something so deeply
>>  deployed as package postinst API without compelling reasons that the
>>  postinst should treat an upgrade differently from a reconfigure,
>>  especially since the user interaction part is already correctly
>>  handled by debconf?
>> 
>>         Given that we have survived for 15 years or so without postinsts
>>  needing to make that distinction will make the compelling reason pretty
>>  interesting.
>
> one concrete example i can give is dbconfig-common.  in this code we would
> ideally like to know when a package is being reconfigured vs upgraded,
> as the types of questions and actions ought to be quite different for the
> two instances and i'm currently stuck with a sub-optimal implementation
> and nasty hacks due to this limitation.
>
> granted i don't care enough to push the case for what would be a pretty
> tedious transition, and i've managed to mostly work around the problem,
> but thought i should mention it.
>
>
> 	sean

Why should dpkg-reconfigure be different from apt-get install
--reinstall for the postinst?

MfG
        Goswin