Re: Feaping Creature-ism in core Debian Packages
> Perl may or may not be inevitable, but what about this in
> /etc/init.d/lprng?
>
> test -f $DAEMON -a -d /usr/doc/lprng || exit 0
>
> Why should the operation of a daemon depend on its
> documentation?
>
> We, for example, keep our docs on a single machine
> NFS mounted on our network. But now at boot time the
> default script for lprng dies silently.
It's checking that the daemon (/usr/sbin/lpd I presume) actually
belongs to the lprng package and not to the lpr package. These two
packages conflict but both include the same /usr/sbin/lpd daemon.
However, on removal of a package, the /etc/init.d/xxx file remains
(it's a configuration file), and is only removed on purging of the
package. So the package maintainer chose to check whether lprng was,
indeed, installed by looking for /usr/doc/lprng.
As you point out, this is not guaranteed to work; it would be better
to test for one of the binaries in /usr/{bin,sbin} which is in
precisely one of the lpr and lprng packages. Please file this as a
bug report against lprng.
Julian
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Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, QMW, Univ. of London. J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk
Debian GNU/Linux Developer, see http://www.debian.org/~jdg
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