Re: Informative addendum to policy clarifying dpkg/maintainer script interface

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

Hi!

On Wed, 2009-10-21 at 20:01:00 -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 21 2009, Frank Küster wrote:
> > Thank you, that looks very useful.  What I'm missing, however, is any
> > reference to debconf's config script.  Isn't that called by dpkg, too? 
> 
>         Hmm. There are three different ways the config script is called,
>  one is (for apt version 0.5 or above) via /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/70debconf
>  -- this calls dpkg-preconfigure (8) to do to preconfigure the packages
>  it is trying to install. That is beyond the scope of the document,
>  since it is just an external program (apt) calling dpkg-preconfigure;
>  and no package state change happens here -- this is just a debconf db
>  update thing.
> 
>         The second way is when you  initiate debconf/confmodule in your
>  postinst, then debconf  tries to call the config script again; this
>  activity is thus part of what the postinst does, and not something this
>  document covers (since we do not say anything about what maintainer
>  scripts do or not do, just how they are called and what they return).
> 
>         Thirdly, if you call dpkg-reconfigure, the config script is run,
>  but, again, this document is not documenting dpkg-reconfigure (or
>  dpkg-preconfigure).  As far asI can see, dpkg-preconfigure also doe
>  snot cause a package state transition, it just runs  the scripts
>  (prerm. config, postinst).
> 
>         Could the dpkg folks chine in if I am wrong?

This seems about right.

regards,
guillem