Bug#582109: debian-policy: document triggers where appropriate

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

Le Sun, Feb 24, 2013 at 04:41:55PM +0900, Charles Plessy a écrit :
> 
> I am having a look at how to document triggers.  In order to simplify the
> explanation and re-use more easily material from the file above, I think
> that we would benefit from documenting the dpkg states for a package.

How about adding the following to the Policy's section 6.1 (Introduction to
package maintainer scripts) ?

          Dpkg defines the folowing states for the packages.
          <taglist>
            <tag><tt>not-installed</tt></tag>
            <item>
              The package is not installed or has been purged.
            </item>

            <tag><tt>config-files</tt></tag>
            <item>
              The package has been removed; its configuration files remain.
            </item>

            <tag><tt>half-installed</tt></tag>
            <item>
              Errors happened during installation, upgrade or removal.  Solving
              them requires the package to be re-installed.
            </item>

            <tag><tt>unpacked</tt></tag>
            <item>
              The files contained in the package have been successfuly unpacked, 
               but the maintainer scripts have not been executed.  Thus, the 
               files created by the maintainer scripts are not yet available.
            </item>

            <tag><tt>half-configured</tt></tag>
            <item>
              The package has been unpacked, and an error occured during the
              execution of one of its maintainer scripts.
            </item>

            <tag><tt>triggers-awaited</tt></tag>
            <item>
              The package has been unpacked and configured, and its
              installation activated some <prgn>dpkg</prgn> triggers that have
              not yet been executed.
            </item>

            <tag><tt>triggers-pending</tt></tag>
            <item>
              Some triggers handled by this package have been activated and are
              not yet executed.
            </item>

            <tag><tt>installed</tt></tag>
            <item>
              The package is installed, no further action is required.
            </item>
          </taglist>

For the half-installed and half-configured, I am not very confident on what I
wrote and surely feedback.

Have a nice week-end,

-- 
Charles