On Sun, 22 Apr 2001 00:57:54 +0200, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Sunday 22 April 2001 00:45, Itai Zukerman wrote: > > Why not compress the binaries in the postinst, maybe after asking the > > admin for permission? > > Well, if I had to answer "no" to compression for binary in every new package > I installed, I'd go nuts rather soon. If, however, it was made the > responsibility of the system somehow, packagers needn't worry of it at all, > users only had to answer once, and whoever had to implement had to do the > work, and nobody had to duplicate it, allowing him to feel nice about himself.
Yes, dpkg needs some way to define hooks, things to be run against every installed package. That should take care of compressed binaries and purging locales & documentation. Maybe dpkg already has such a thing. If not, I suggest a debhelper command to add the necessary code to the postinst. Packages that use this should, of course, depend on the binary-compressing package, which would provide the one-time question you want. The postinst code would call the compression routines, which might not do anything, depending on how the compressing package was configured (i.e., it wouldn't call the compressing code directly, but through a wrapper). Any objections? -itai
