[BRAINSTORMING] simplifying maintainer's life

[Baptiste Daroussin]

On Wed, Sep 03, 2014 at 10:09:33AM +0100, Matthew Seaman wrote:
> On 09/03/14 09:25, Baptiste Daroussin wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > On of the most borring thing IMHO in the plist maintainance is all the
> > directories.
> > 
> > I have been working on some evolutions I want to share and discuss before making
> > them official.
> > 
> > First you have to know that since pkg 1.3 @dirrm and @dirrmtry are equivalent.
> > 
> > Evolutions:
> > 1/ stop prepending directories in plist with @dir*: let pkg discover the path
> > correspond to a directory and handle it as such (easy)
> 
> Presumably if you need an empty directory, just add it to the plist.

Yup
> 
> > 2/ make pkg automatically remove directories under PREFIX without the need of
> > adding them in plist, such as only empty directories and directories not under
> > PREFIX will have to be listed. Of course pkg will not try to remove directories
> > owned by another package.
> 
> There should be some concept of shared use directories, so eg.  if
> package foo installs /usr/local/foobar/foo and then later package bar
> installs /usr/local/foobar/bar. Should you then delete package foo,
> package bar should inherit ownership of /usr/local/foobar/
> 
> For a real example of this consider eg. p5-DBD-Pg and p5-DBD-Sqlite.
> 
> Probably we can just say directory /usr/local/foobar belongs to both
> packages foo and bar, and it only gets deleted when the last owner is
> removed and if it is empty.

That is what I was trying to explain :)
> 
> Needs more thought though.  What happens if two packages disagree about
> ownership and permissions on a common directory?  I guess that should
> just be treated like a conflicting file, and block installation of the
> second package.

Right now we have no way to handle this in pkg(8) but that could be added later
> 
> > To achieve the point 2 that will mean we will stop using the mtree inside
> > packages and create a "hier" package that will have the default hierarchy and
> > every package but pkg will depend on this hier package (except if PREFIX !=
> > LOCALBASE)
> 
> And if you follow the shared ownership idea to its logical conclusion,
> /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/man and /usr/local/share  end up with shared
> ownership by almost every package you have installed.  Would you
> actually need to have a hier package at all?  Although having one would
> still be a good idea IMHO.

hier also defined /usr/local/etc/libmap.d or /usr/local/etc/rc.conf.d :)
> 
> > 2 bonus of this approach:
> > - it will speed up pkg operation by avoiding to have to extract the mtree for
> >   each package installation
> > - it will simplify a lot check-plist
> > 
> > Any opinion here?
> 
> Having both mtree and the package manifest both providing very similar
> functionality is somewhat redundant.

The mtree will be not packaged at all anymore.

regards,
Bapt
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