On Sat, Dec 24, 2005 at 05:03:17PM +0100, Sven Luther wrote: > Notice that the debconf helper scripts provide stdout on &3, so any > scripts writing to stdout only need to redirect their output to &3, no > ?
No, that won't work; if you send something to fd 3, it will go to the debconf frontend and be interpreted as a debconf protocol command. In any case, it's only the shell confmodule that sets up fd 3 to go to the frontend, and the kernel-package-generated postinst is written in Perl; people may well have written postinst.d fragments in Perl too. Please use stderr instead, or, if possible, just make the script quiet. The fd 3 redirection (and the corresponding redirection of stdout to stderr in the shell confmodule) was always acknowledged as a nasty hack in debconf. At the time, as I understand it, Joey reckoned it was easier to do that than to try to get everyone to change maintainer script code that used stdout. It has various undesirable consequences, such as the requirement to call db_stop before starting daemons that don't take care to close down all their file descriptors, and some very weird workarounds in the confmodule bindings for other languages (see the changelog entry for debconf 0.3.74). My impression is that these days maintainer scripts are much better about not mixing up debconf interaction with normal use of stdout, and so it's still possible that the fd 3 hack will be removed some day. -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
