Jason Gunthorpe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Sun, Dec 12, 1999 at 12:32:08AM -0800, Chris Waters wrote:
> > The downside is, of course, that dpkg isn't very good at ordering > > things, but again, that's a flaw in dpkg, and I think we'd be better > > off trying to address that, not just for essential packages, but for > > the benefit of the whole system. > Sigh. Why does everyone think this is a flaw in dpkg? Is 'rm -rf /' a flaw > in rm? Not a valid analogy. The issue here is that essential packages are, in essence, *PRE*-dependencies of the entire system, not just dependencies. And dpkg has *never* handled pre-dependencies very gracefully. (I still recall, on my first install of debian, having to run the install process several times, because dpkg was confused by all the pre-dependencies in the base system.) This is more like if rm choked on symlinks. > dpkg is the very lowest interface to the packaging system, it > performs all the *mandatory* checks necessary to do any operation. Yes, well, perhaps modifying dpkg isn't the only way to address the problem; I'll grant that. Modifying *all* the existing tools that use dpkg is another perfectly viable, and possibly preferable approach. Except, of course, for the fact that there are a lot of such tools, and there may well be inhouse tools we're not aware of. I don't know; seems like everybody but me is enamoured of complex, baroque solutions that involve jumping through hoops while juggling chainsaws. I think that fixing dpkg would be a simple and final solution to the problem. Yes, it requires more work up front, but I think it would save a lot of work and broken systems in the long run. It's called "doing it right". I'm a lot more sympathetic to this objection than I am to AT's, though. Fixing all the dselect methods would certainly be a Good Thing. :-)
