Ben Armstrong <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Tue, 2005-10-11 at 19:28 +0200, Frank Küster wrote: >> is there an established way to find out in the postinst script of a >> package whether an other package (e.g. one which we Recommend or >> Suggest) is configured? Testing for file contents can only tell whether >> it is unpacked, but that might not be enough. >> >> If there isn't, are there other people who felt the need to know this? > > I worry about why you would need to know this. I'm envisioning a > package "A" that has a particular default configuration if you install A > before B, but a different configuration if you install B before A. What > will the user be missing out on if they're installed in the "wrong" > order? And what corrective action can the user take?
In the particular case, the reason is something else: If the recommended package B (tetex-bin) is there, it makes sense to run one of its executables (mktexlsr, updmap) to register the files of package A (any TeX font package). This is a time-consuming process. However, if B is installed but unconfigured, we can save this time because when B is configured, it will run these executables, anyway, and doing this also will pick up package A's files. While writing this, I get the feeling that I don't want to know this. I have been thinking about a mechanism to run these time-consuming processed with a dpkg-postinstallation hook as zope does for a long time. But I decided not to do this because they sometimes fail (99% because of user misconfiguration), and it's better to know which package was configured when it failed. For the same reason, I probably don't want to delay the registration process if tetex-bin isn't already configured. Regards, Frank -- Frank Küster Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich Debian Developer
