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

[Florent Thoumie]

Brooks Davis wrote:
> 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?

	I have nothing against that. The command above sounded really
	simple to me that it wouldn't need a separate @ command. But
	why not.

>>>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.

	Ok, what you meant is now clearer to me. I have no good idea of
	how this exactly works but IIRC i've seen sysutils/pkg_install
	whose job must be to "solve" this problem. I think we have kind
	of version, with packing list format version. I need to dig into
	this. I've only seen a little part of pkg_install actually.

>>>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.

	I just wanted to add @conf feature because ports lacks some
	guidelines concerning how to handle configuration, where to
	put sample, and I needed that support in pkg_install before
	I can write my patch for bsd.port.mk.

	I'm quite interested in pkg_install, I think there could be
	a lot of interesting things to add. I'll probably try to add
	such a purge command later.

-- 
Florent Thoumie
flz at xbsd.org