Goswin von Brederlow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Tollef Fog Heen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > >> * sean finney >> >> | is this even remotely acceptable? i had the impressions that packages >> | must not assume the inner workings of dpkg. but, i can't back this up >> | with anything in policy from what i can tell, hence the posting of >> | this question. >> >> Before responding, please read the bug report (390823) mentioned in >> the changelog. Oh, and if we deem this unacceptable, please do >> suggest a different way and file bugs on a lot of the archive, >> including all doing stuff like: >> >> [...] >> old_md5sum="`sed -n -e \"/^Conffiles:/,/^[^ ]/{\\\\' $CONFFILE'{s/.* >> //;p}}\" /var/lib/dpkg/status`" >> >> [...] > > I think this is different from messing with the maintainer > scripts. But none the less I think a better way for this would be to > call 'dpkg -s package'.
I think the main reason why this is not being done is that there's a general fear that calling "dpkg -s" from a script that has been called by dpkg might give unpredictable, or at least not the desired results. If it were documented how dpkg behaves under such circumstances (same for "dpkg -l"), people might be willing to change this. Regards, Frank -- Dr. Frank Küster Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)