Bug#209855: [PROPOSAL] Move documentation of behavior of ancient dpkg in 6.6 to a footnote

[Andreas Metzler]

Package: debian-policy
Version: 3.6.1.0
Severity: wishlist

Policy 6.6 describing argumntsx given to "postinst configure" contains
this paragraph:
| If there is no most recently configured version dpkg will pass a null
| argument; older versions of dpkg may pass <unknown> (including the
| angle brackets) in this case. Even older ones do not pass a second
| argument at all, under any circumstances.

As dpkg used "<unknown>" only up to version 1.2.0 (released May 1996),
supporting "<unknown>" in maintainerscripts serves no practical
purpose anymore, installing a fairly recent (even from potato) package
on such an ancient system would probably fail for other reasons (e.g.
dependencies).

I therefore I propose to clearly mark this as obsolete, as in "Don't
bother to implement if you have to write a new postinst-script." by
moving it into a footnote.

There was some initial discussion about this issue on debian-devel,
starting with
 Date: Sun, 7 Sep 2003 10:23:15 -0500
 From: Branden Robinson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
 Subject: Re: /etc/shells management
 Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
resulting in this suggested wording (courtesy of Daniel Martin):
--------------------------
--- CVS/debian-policy/policy.sgml       Sat Aug 23 22:23:53 2003
+++ policy.sgml Tue Sep  9 17:27:00 2003
@@ -3648,10 +3648,18 @@
 
        <p>
          If there is no most recently configured version
-         <prgn>dpkg</prgn> will pass a null argument; older versions
-         of dpkg may pass <tt>&lt;unknown&gt;</tt> (including the
-         angle brackets) in this case.  Even older ones do not pass a
-         second argument at all, under any circumstances.
+         <prgn>dpkg</prgn> will pass a null argument.
+           <footnote>
+             <p>
+                Historical note: Truly ancient (pre-1997) versions of
+                <prgn>dpkg</prgn> passed <tt>&lt;unknown&gt;</tt> (including
+                the angle brackets) in this case.  Even older ones did not
+                pass a second argument at all, under any circumstance.  Note
+                that upgrades using such an old dpkg version are unlikely to
+                work for other reasons, even if this old argument behavior
+                is handled by your postinst script.
+             </p>
+           </footnote>
        </p>
       </sect>
--------------------------

          hth, cu andreas

-- System Information
Debian Release: 3.0
Architecture: i386
Kernel: Linux downhill 2.4.21acpi #1 Son Jun 15 20:21:21 CEST 2003 i686
Locale: LANG=de_AT, LC_CTYPE=de_AT

Versions of packages debian-policy depends on:
ii  fileutils                     4.1-10     GNU file management utilities

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