[BRAINSTORMING] simplifying maintainer's life

[Baptiste Daroussin]

On Wed, Sep 03, 2014 at 12:01:44PM +0200, Tijl Coosemans wrote:
> On Wed, 3 Sep 2014 10:25:39 +0200 Baptiste Daroussin <bapt at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
> > 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)
> 
> Good.
> 
> > 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.
> > 
> > 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)
> 
> I think you can avoid the hier package and thus the PREFIX != LOCALBASE
> problem.
> 
> Assume there are no packages with empty directories, then pkg can
> always remove empty directories when deinstalling a package, because
> no files in the directory means no package requires it.  You don't need
> a hier package in this case.
> 
> You can add support for packages with empty directories in two ways:
> - Put a dummy file in the directory, e.g. .PKGNAME.keepme
>   (simple to implement, but maybe some packages really need the
>   directory to be empty or maybe they only expect a specific type of
>   files)
> - Record something like .PKGNAME.keepme in the pkg db but don't
>   actually create that file.

We do already support empty directories natively we do not need the .keep
whatever and this works pretty well :)
if a line in the plist is a directory (or @dirrm* ) then the directory is
considered as owned by the package and always created

My only problem is to still provide the default grobal hier in provided by
BSD.local.dist (like etc/rc.conf.d etc/libmap.d etc) that said we have actually
only 4 empty directories all documented in the respective manpages from base
where they are used, so yes probably I can just ignore the mtree at all
Which makes the feature easy to implement then.

In anycase I will limit auto removal to PREFIX (the one supplied when creating
the package) because base has its own mtree and I do not want to delete any
empty directory from base at least until base is package itself.

regards,
Bapt
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