Ian Jackson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Frank Küster writes ("Re: mucking with dpkg control files in maintainer > scripts?"): >> 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 you need this information, dpkg -s is a better way to get it than > messing around with /var/lib/dpkg - but see my earlier message. > > Messing with conffiles is _very complicated_ and doing so by hand in > maintscripts is likely to produce more subtle and complicated bugs > rather than fewer bugs. > >> If it were documented how dpkg behaves under such circumstances (same >> for "dpkg -l"), people might be willing to change this. > > Where is this documentation you refer to ?
It is nowhere AFAIK, and this is the problem. > dpkg -s and dpkg -l are > equally reliable in this respect. In other words, "commits" to the dpkg database are atomic, and if dpkg is called from a script started by dpkg, it will report all packages in the correct, current and maybe partial state, including the package processed so far? Regards, Frank -- Dr. Frank Küster Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)