Re: dpkg Selective Install
David Engel writes ("Re: dpkg Selective Install"):
> Yes. I'd rather only give users a well defined, limited set of
> classes of files to not install (eg. man pages, info files, examples,
> etc.). The install/remove scripts should then be modified to handle
> these cases.
>
> The ability to use wildcards to specify which files to not install
> could be kept but should clearly labeled for expert use only and a
> warning that it may cause problems.
I think many people have misunderstood me.
I do *not* plan to provide any easy way for users to exclude files
from being installed. What I plan to do is to have dpkg read a
usually-nonexistent conffile in /etc and use wildcard patterns from
it. This would be documented in the manual, with warnings telling you
you'd better know what you were doing.
If we provide lusers with an easy way not to install the documentation
they will use it and then complain at us.
Leaving out bits of system is something that only experts should do,
and they will know the implications and heed the warnings about "this
may not work the way you hope".
People who have such small hard disks that they can't fit the
documentation will have to be experts anyway, as will people who want
to NFS-mount /usr from another machine.
It's possible that this feature could be used to support CDROM
live-filesystem installations, but in that case it will all be managed
behind the user's back and they'll never know or use the full power
and danger of the feature.
Ian.
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