Acknowledgement sent to Simon Richter <sjr@debian.org>:
New Bug report received and forwarded. Copy sent to sjr@debian.org, Dpkg Developers <team@dpkg.org>.
(full text, mbox, link).
To: Debian Bug Tracking System <submit@bugs.debian.org>
Subject: a way for a prerm to postpone package removal
Date: Fri, 30 Jun 2006 13:26:08 +0200
Package: dpkg
Version: 1.13.21
Severity: wishlist
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Hash: SHA1
Hi,
I thought it would be nice if there were a way for a prerm to indicate
that it would like to abort package removal but not flag an error.
Rationale: When I have the metapackage for "current kernel" installed, I
get a new kernel-image package every so often, and at the same time the
old kernel goes unused in the eyes of aptitude, so it wants to remove
it. The kernel's prerm then asks the user whether to uninstall the
running kernel (bad) or abort the removal. If the user chooses to abort
the removal, dpkg bails out as it could not perform the requested
action, thus making the entire installation fail. If it were possible to
say "not yet" and have dpkg ignore the removal request and return a
special exit code ("not entirely successful"), then aptitude could
reconsider that the removal is not required at this time (because it's
just an unused package being removed) and leave the package in "to be
removed" state. Eventually, the user will boot the new kernel, at which
time the removal of the old kernel will succeed.
The only way to "emulate" such a feature for aptitude would be to retry
removals package-by-package in order to find out what failed (the user
would be prompted again here), which takes a lot more time than just
rereading the status and deciding on a further course of action (fail if
the removal was needed, ignore otherwise).
Simon
- -- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.16-2-amd64-k8
Locale: LANG=ja_JP.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=ja_JP.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Versions of packages dpkg depends on:
ii coreutils 5.96-3 The GNU core utilities
ii libc6 2.3.6-15 GNU C Library: Shared libraries
dpkg recommends no packages.
- -- debconf-show failed
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