Darren/Torin/Who Ever... wrote: > I inherited this when I inherited the package in November of 1995. It > was setup this way so that after the removal of the previous Perl > package and before the installation of a new Perl package, there was > still a Perl available. Since we always needed a Perl, we wanted to > avoid that small window. > > I notice that bash doesn't do any shenanigans like this. Is this a > relic of bygone days and I don't need to do this funky stuff anymore? > That would make things much easier for me.
It's my understanding that dpkg is (and always has been) designed so this kind of thing isn't necessary. As I understand it, when a package is upgraded, for each file, dpkg does this: - extracts new file as .dpkg-new - if it can, atomically overwrites the old file with the .dpkg-new file - if not (replacing directory with file, etc), renames the old file to .dpkg-old, and renames .dpkg-new to the final filename - removes .dpkg-old file Nowhere in there do I see any time at all when some version of the file is not available. -- see shy jo
