Re: What is state of package installed despite dependencies?
On Fri, Jun 29, 2001 at 11:07:04PM -0700, Ross Boylan wrote:
> Just for the record, I don't think there's a problem with the original
> or the packaging. During the upgrade the program makes some
> non-backward compatible changes. It asks and warns you before doing
> so. I just happened to want to go backward afterwards. The only
> possible bug would be dpkg -i going part way through an install and
> then bailing. For all I know, that's feature, since dpkg is probably
> intended for low level control without training wheels.
Dpkg is actually very careful. If there are problems at any stage of
the installation process, it will try to do a rollback. But dpkg also
has to execute various maintainer scripts during package installation
and removal. If these scripts contain errors, then even dpkg runs into
a wall. For the user, this is confusing, because she may not be able
to resolve the situation using dpkg normally, eg. when both postinst
and prerm script contain errors.
If you want to know how dpkg goes about in these matters, I believe it
is documented in debian policy nowadays.
Cheers,
Joost
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