Bug#504880: Disambiguate "installed" for packages
On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 08:27:57PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org> writes:
>
> > Please find a proposed patch in attachment. Feel free to reword/improve
> > if needed.
>
> Is the reason why you can't rely on configured for the prerm case the same
> reason why you can't rely on it for the postinst case: because of breaking
> circular dependencies and choosing one package to deconfigure first? It
> just seems conceptually odd to use Pre-Depends for a dependency for a
> removal script.
>
> I'm a little concerned that this sounds like an implicit encouragement to
> use Pre-Depends more because you can rely on it, and I don't think we want
> to do that. I'm not entirely sure how to avoid that, though, and in
> context there are other warnings against using Pre-Depends. What we
> really want to do is actively discourage circular dependencies, since in
> the absence of circular dependencies, Depends works as expected and you
> can rely on packages being configured for postinst and prerm dependencies.
I completly agree.
> What happens if there are circular Pre-Depends? Does dpkg just give up at
> that point and throw a fatal error?
Experimentally, as soon as there is at least one Pre-Depends in a
dependency loop, apt or dpkg throws an error and abort.
Adding Pre-Depends to a circular dependency only make things worse not
better.
Cheers,
--
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>
Imagine a large red swirl here.
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