Re: Always run dpkg --dry-run -i before running dpkg -i!
On Thu, 6 Jan 2005, William Ballard wrote:
> Apparently the dickhead maintainer of ndiswrapper-source has just gone
> into his shell and refuses to discuss this problem.
>
> Since his package (and theoretically any package which generates
> packages) may be uninstallable because there is no way to say "give me
> the source and everything I need to be able to use the output" via
> Recommends, or a foo-source-end-user metapackage which depends on
> foo-source and foo-utils, we are left in the situation of not being able
> to trust that -source packages won't hork our system.
>
> (If the package is a network card driver source package our system may
> then be unfixable because now our network card is hosed).
>
> Given that -source packages do not adequately specify the dependencies
> to be able to use the output, one must NEVER run "dpkg -i" a given deb
> without first running "dpkg --dry-run -i" on the same debs and verifying
> that it returns a zero exit code.
>
> I don't know why this isn't the default behavior of dpkg -i, checking
> that at least all dependencies will be met before uninstalling old
> packages and leaving the system broken.
Er, huh? I don't see what problem you are describing.
What *exactly* is the issue you have?
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