Re: The future (or non-future) of ia32-libs
On Sun, Jun 24, 2012 at 03:57:29PM +0800, Thomas Goirand wrote:
> > Release notes are meant to be read once, not every time you upgrade a
> > system. Having a debconf note once might be appropriate. The second
> > time, you'll go "right, I've seen that before". The third time you go
> > "sigh, yes, I know, fuck off". The fourth time, you hit ctrl-C, and run
> > "DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get upgrade" -- and then miss
> > something that was actually important and didn't occur on previous
> > installs.
> > Please, let's keep upgrade information in the release notes. If some
> > people don't read them, that's something we should try to fix; not by
> > trying to work around the release notes, but by making them more
> > accessible, easier to find, and more obvious instead.
> Well, if you update apt + dpkg first, then --add-architecture i386, and
> *then only* dist-upgrade (or if we manage to update apt / dpkg in
> stable, so that it does that automatically), it wouldn't display the
> debconf. So if you were doing lots of upgrades, it would display the
> debconf screen only if you do the mistake to forget about the
> --add-architecture i386. So I don't think that my proposal is an abuse
> of debconf as you describe.
It's an abuse of debconf because if you know the system is broken, we should
do better than just to tell the user that the system is broken. We should
either give them the option to automatically fix it on upgrade, or - better
by far - we should automatically fix it for them on upgrade.
Why would anyone who has the ia32-libs package installed want anything *but*
to have 'dpkg --add-architecture i386' on upgrade?
That said, I'm not sure I wouldn't also consider it an abuse of base-files
to make that package do this on upgrade. If you're going to task some
package with transitioning to multiarch, it probably makes more sense to do
it in dpkg itself.
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/
slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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