On Sat Sep 5, 2026 at 10:02 PM CEST, Holger Levsen wrote: > On Sat, Sep 05, 2026 at 09:07:14PM +0200, Serafeim (Serafi) Zanikolas wrote: >> Holger, is there anything holding this back, or is it just a case of >> preparing >> a patch? (happy to do so, in the latter case).
please find a revised patch attached. all credit to you, I just did the rubber duck :) thanks, serafi
From 8c9611bb6e9fce40552f3e05378f6a1f275cf01f Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "Serafeim (Serafi) Zanikolas" <[email protected]> Date: Sun, 13 Sep 2026 21:37:57 +0200 Subject: [PATCH] best-pkging-practices: add expectations on postinst robustness. Closes: #801065. --- source/best-pkging-practices.rst | 23 +++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 23 insertions(+) diff --git a/source/best-pkging-practices.rst b/source/best-pkging-practices.rst index 3dea1c4..cc3cebb 100644 --- a/source/best-pkging-practices.rst +++ b/source/best-pkging-practices.rst @@ -574,6 +574,9 @@ that isn't handled merely by the creation or removal of files and directories. The following instructions supplement the `Debian Policy <https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/>`__. +Generic guidelines +-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- + Maintainer scripts must be idempotent. That means that you need to make sure nothing bad will happen if the script is called twice where it would usually be called once. @@ -612,6 +615,26 @@ shell-builtin for many shells and is defined in POSIX. Using ``which`` is an acceptable alternative, since it is from the required ``debianutils`` package. +Expected behavior of complex postinst scripts +-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- + +``postinst`` scripts must normally not fail, except for very rare cases. +These are cases where postinst must succeed: + +on fresh installs: + - the service configuration is straightforward and can be reasonably + expected to work as-is in typical Debian setups + - the service has no external dependencies (e.g. a database which may not + yet be configured, or unreachable at install time) + +on upgrades: + - ``postinst`` can verify with high confidence (which may not always be + feasible) that the service was running prior to the restart + - the service has no external dependencies or ``postinst`` can verify that + they are functional + - the service configuration has not changed in backwards incompatible ways + between the old and new package versions + .. _bpp-config-mgmt: Configuration management with ``debconf`` -- 2.47.3
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
