Jonathan P Tomer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > why not just have dummy packages delete themselves in postinst, if we're > going to use them?
That can be done.. but it's not quite so simple (dpkg isn't re-entrant unless the nested invocations are read-only). I suppose the trivial implementation would be (in postinst) ( until dpkg --remove xfntwhatever; do sleep 120 done >/var/tmp/removexfntwhatever.log 2>&1 & ) [The parenthesis mean that the until loop has init as parent, rather than dpkg, and unless the system is rebooted the package will eventually get removed. Perhaps --purge should be used instead of --remove. Perhaps 120 should be replaced with $(perl -le 'srand; print int 600*rand'). Etc.] > the real solution of course is to add a Replaces: or some such to dpkg, > because it really does happen that things change names as they evolve. And, currently, dpkg is brittle (the implementation has several conflicting designs), which is why we're still talking about slink and aren't freezing potato. Until dpkg is fixed we have to live with its warts. -- Raul