Re: delayed actions for texlive
Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at> wrote:
> Hi Florent!
>
> On Mon, 30 Okt 2006, Florent Rougon wrote:
>> Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at> wrote:
>> http://lists.debian.org/debian-tetex-maint/2005/07/msg00279.html
>
> Where you wrote:
> But this breaks Debian Policy quite clearly. Suppose package B depends
> on TeX package A to build some documentation in PDF format in
> B.postinst. Policy says that B can simply Depend on A and it will be
> safe: A is guaranteed to be configured before B.postinst is run. But if
> A is really configured (update-updmap, mktexlsr, updmap, whatever)
> *after* B, B.postinst will fail.
>
>
>
> To be honest, I can't believe that someone uses TeX&Co in the
> POSTINST?!?! At build-time, yes, but I have to see one postinst that
> actually *creates* documents at postinst time. Nup.
Still it is a violation of Debian policy. What about a program that
creates it's own font configuration from updmap's output, because it
does not understand any of the existing formats, but has a
transformation rule?
> So are there any comments - besides yes in theory it breaks policy - to
> the proposal I send recently (meta packages execute the delayed
> actions)?
Yes, my other objection is that if the call fails (and updmap-sys does
fail from time to time) there's no way to tell which package is
responsible. That's not a problem for maintainers (bugs are often
reported against the wrong package, anyway), but for the local admin or
user. They might not even be aware that something has changed with TeX
stuff - they just get an error from dpkg and don't know how to proceed.
Well, this could be done with some additional information that is
displayed upon failure. But remember, debconf should be used for this,
and I don't know whether it is available at this stage, and how to do
it.
As for the "this formally violates policy", I would not do it without
prior discussion on -devel.
Regards, Frank
--
Dr. Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)
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