bin/77082: src/usr.sbin/pkg_install - Add 3 new macros to clean pkg-plist

[Brooks Davis]

The following reply was made to PR bin/77082; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Brooks Davis <brooks at one-eyed-alien.net>
To: Florent Thoumie <flz at xbsd.org>
Cc: Brooks Davis <brooks at one-eyed-alien.net>,
	FreeBSD-gnats-submit at freebsd.org, freebsd-bugs at freebsd.org,
	hq at freebsd.org
Subject: Re: bin/77082: src/usr.sbin/pkg_install - Add 3 new macros to clean pkg-plist
Date: Fri, 4 Feb 2005 11:04:57 -0800

 On Fri, Feb 04, 2005 at 07:41:29PM +0100, Florent Thoumie wrote:
 > Brooks Davis wrote:
 > 
 > >It seems like dirrmtry should take an optional message to emit if the
 > >event that the directory can not be delete.  That way the user can be
 > >informed that the directory should be removed if they are really done
 > >using the port.
 > 
 > 	I asked myself if I should put this feature in my patch and
 > 	I finally haven't because it required some extra-stuff
 > 	(handling optional arguments for @ commands is painful), and a
 > 	simple '@unexec [ -d ${PREFIX}/etc ] && echo ...' is easier I
 > 	guess. But that's no problem for me to include that if everybody
 > 	thinks it worth it.
 
 Given this workaround, it's probably not a high priority to add this.
 Hmm, what about a seperate @echoifexists or similar command?
 
 > >Have you thought about how to solve the boot strapping problems with
 > >pkg_install/pkg_delete?
 > 
 > 	I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, I started
 > 	looking at pkg_install source yesterday at night. Could you
 > 	give me some pointers about that ?
 
 The issue is that you need to find a way to keep users from installing
 packages they can't uninstall.  If you add new commands and they are
 used in ports, users with older systems won't have the necessicary
 pkg_delete commands to make them work.  The current system doens't even
 give a graceful way of detecting this condition both in the port and
 when the users installs a pkg from the -stable collections online.
 Longer term, we need some versioning in the plist and ports, but first
 we've got to solve the problem we're stuck with now.
 
 > >Our nominal pkg_install maintainer is MIA at the moment.
 > 
 > 	Ok, actually I knew eik has been working on it, but I didn't
 > 	know who was the active maintainer now.
 
 Last I heard, eik was the one working it, but no one has heard from him
 in a while.  He's been gone long enough that someone else could
 certaintly commit to pkg_install given public review.
 
 > 	I have thought of a new purge command, that would act like
 > 	dpkg --purge on Debian but AFAIK that would be impossible
 > 	since it would need persistent package records (that still
 > 	exists after a package has been removed as long as we have
 > 	some configuration files for this port in the tree).
 
 This would be a really cool feature.  Off hand, you'd probably want to
 create another dirctory under /var/db to store these records.  That
 would certaintly be allowed to support such a feature.
 
 -- Brooks