Re: dpkg urgent wishlist : Delayed Configuration override

[Jason Gunthorpe <jgg@gpu.srv.ualberta.ca>]

On Tue, 14 Oct 1997, Christoph Lameter wrote:

> If packages could be equipped with some sort of flag that would tell dpkg
> that this critical package needs to be configured immediately then this
> problem would be solved. Two variations come to my mind:

I was thinking about this and it sort of occured to me it might be better
to have a 3rd phase ie:
  unpack
  post-unpack script
  <...>
  install scripts

Ie this new script would be invoked immediately after unpacking of the
package. The idea would be that the script would check if the package is
configured, if it is then it would immediately 'ready' the program. For
things like squid, apache, watchdog, etc this would result in minimal
downtime during an upgrade, but still allow all questions to be asked at
the end of the lengthy unpacking phase if this was a new package.

We could call this the postunpack script or something. This doesn't quite
follow the dpkg notion of what should happen though.

A good deal of the rest of your post should not be handled by special case
preconfigure flag, but by a general rule that packages should be
configured before depending packages are configured and so on. If bash
breaks if libreadline is unpacked but not configured, then it likely
should pre-depend on libreadline.

Also, while on this topic, I have been pondering that packages like bash,
perl, and other 'required' priority packages are assumed to be working for
packages of a lower priority and should be configured first. A simple
example would be that a package with shell scripts requires that bash is
configured. Similary programs that use shellutils like sed also require
them to be configured. 

Maybe we should take this one step further and say that essential/required
programs should be unpacked and configured in a single step, so as to
prevent the rest of the system from breaking. If it wasn't for the fact
that configure scripts ask questions I would think configuring all
packages as the soonest possible moment would be a good thing.

This whole ordering topic has alot of things it can do, hopefully Manoj
will have to time to explore them with Deity.

Just a thought,
Jason




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