** On May 22, Paul Seelig scribbled:
> > files, then runs some utility to investigate what files are missing from all
> > the packages and record those in some database (/var/lib/dpkg/held-files??).
> > Sure, there would be situations where one or antoher file deleted by
> > accident would get into that database, but nothing's perfect. The admin
> > would have the ability to scan only a specific package for deleted files, of
> > course.
> >
> It would be quite nice if dpkg/apt could eventually check for a script
> like e.g. "/usr/local/sbin/postinst.local", as adduser already does in
> a similiar vein:
Hmm... or, even better, /var/lib/dpkg/local/packagename (or even
/var/lib/dpkg/local/packagename.{pre|postinst,pre|postrm}) script that would
take care of all the local work as required by the admin. Yes, that's a much
better solution to what I proposed :)
[snip]
> But OTOH any local sysadmin could easily create a set of scripts which
> call the usual installation routines and then afterwards the proposed
> "/usr/local/sbin/postinst.local" stuff in just a single pass without
> bloating dpkg/apt with further functionality, for which only a small
> amount of admins might have any use for. And since it's possible to
> create such a routine in this way, why burden the dpkg/apt maintainers
> with more code to maintain? Modularity is the answer.
That approach would require the scripts to monitor what packages were
upgraded/installed, i.e. taking a snapshot of the package system before and
after the installation - it must be assumed that the admin could use any
(even not yet existing) utility to perform the actual upgrade - it can be
done with apt-get, with dpkg itself, with dselect, gnome-apt - all of these
would have to be wrapped up in monitoring scripts so that the system always
knows when a change happens. I think what you proposed, with local scripts,
is much better.
> Maybe you (or anybody else interested in this matter) could just sit
> down for a moment (or two or three ;) and create a new Debian package
> for the admin section containing a suite of scripts for exactly this
> purpose?
Looking at what I wrote above, the script approach doesn't seem good to me,
but an addition to dpkg to process the local scripts... hmm... can anyone
who knows the dpkg internals well tell me how hard would it be to add this
functionality?
marek
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