Re: [fink-core] Updated dpkg and apt in my experimental (/hilight drm)

[Sjors G. <mai...@da...>]

Op 12 aug 2011, om 02:17 heeft Alexander Hansen het volgende geschreven:

> Just realized that an issue that I have been seeing is due to changes in
> how the new dpkg does update-alternatives.  On that dpkg, I keep getting
> things like:
> 
> Setting up fvwm2-no-gnome (2.6.1-1) ...
> update-alternatives: error: alternative path /sw/bin/fvwm2 doesn't exist.
> /sw/bin/dpkg: error processing fvwm2-no-gnome (--install):
> subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 2
> Errors were encountered while processing:
> fvwm2-no-gnome
> 
> (and, indeed, I never had any fvwm* package installed)
> 
> On the other hand, with the older dpkg from the Fink distro,
> fvwm2-no-gnome was happy to install.

It wouldn't be the first tool dpkg ships that has become more anal since the newer version. I've compiled the package myself, and it seems the package does install an /sw/bin/fvwm2, but it's a link to /sw/bin/fvwm, which is removed in the packages' InstallScript. I guess the old update-alternatives either does not care if the link target doesn't exist, or it doesn't check if it's a symlink that eventually points to a file that doesn't exist.

I think in this case this extra nagging is a good thing -- it has shown a packaging problem in this package. It seems upstream has pushed some of the changes the InstallScript did itself too. By removing and linking them again, the script seems to have removed some files that probably were symlinks at some point, but now contained the original files again. I've modified the package not to remove bin/fvwm anymore, and made some other changes to update the binaries; this causes the package to install correctly. A fixed fvwm2 infofile is attached. The package maintainer (drm) will of course have to take a look, as I have never used fvwm myself, so I can't be sure if what I did doesn't conflict with other packages or really made sense for it...

Do you agree with my "the extra nagging is a feature, not a bug", in this case?

Sjors