Debian Bug report logs - #672608
dpkg: Support dynamic pathname registration into packages

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Message #5 received at submit@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Roger Leigh <rleigh@debian.org>

To: Debian Bug Tracking System <submit@bugs.debian.org>

Subject: dpkg: Please support registration of additional files for a package in addition to those in the deb manifest

Date: Sat, 12 May 2012 13:07:25 +0100

Package: dpkg
Version: 1.16.3
Severity: wishlist

Currently, if a package provides or generates files in addition to
those shipped in the .deb data.tar.gz, the package prerm/postrm
needs to take care to ensure that these files are correctly cleaned
up.  However, given that the logic to generate the files may change
between package versions, and that the cleanup logic needs to be
kept in sync with the generation logic, there is a great potential
for bugs here: either failing to cleanup files correctly, or deleting
files owned by other packages or created by the admin.

It would be a great improvement if dpkg provided a mechanism to
associate other files/dirs with the package, so that these would be
automatically get removed when the package is removed.  This would
prevent the need to keep two or more scripts up-to-date with each
other, and also avoid the mistakes in all the corner case scenarios
which can lead to leaving a mess behind, or causing dataloss.

It would also be useful if additional conffiles could be registered
or deregistered so that these would additionally gain from correct
--purge behaviour.  It may also provide a useful mechanism for
preserving a record of conffiles which are currently "forgotten" if
the package drops them on upgrade.

I would think such a mechanism would be required not to allow
alteration of the packaged files in package.list.  This would have
the potential to cause random conflicts and break upgrades in
unpredictable ways.  Registration in a separate supplementary
list would prevent this, and perhaps also allow for these extra
files to be taken over by other packages.  But it would permit
supplementary files and conffiles to be added and removed during
the lifetime of the package being installed, and give robust and
consistent behaviour when it came to removal and purging.

Maybe these could in /var/lib/dpkg/info/package.supplist and
/var/lib/dpkg/info/suppconffiles (for example; I'm sure there
are better naming schemes).

I think such a change would greatly improve the quality and
complexity of our maintainer scripts.


Regards,
Roger

-- System Information:
Debian Release: wheezy/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (550, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (400, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-2-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages dpkg depends on:
ii  libbz2-1.0   1.0.6-1
ii  libc6        2.13-32
ii  libselinux1  2.1.9-4
ii  tar          1.26-4
ii  xz-utils     5.1.1alpha+20110809-3
ii  zlib1g       1:1.2.7.dfsg-1

dpkg recommends no packages.

Versions of packages dpkg suggests:
ii  apt  0.9.3

-- no debconf information

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