Re: [Fink-devel] tetex upgrade problems

[David R. M. <dr...@ma...>]

On Feb 21,2003 15:04:39 -0500, Anthony DeRobertis <an...@de...> =
wrote :
>On Mon, 2003-02-17 at 05:14, Martin Costabel wrote:
>> On lundi, f=E9v 17, 2003, at 08:48 Europe/Paris, Anthony DeRobertis wr=
ote:
>> []
>> > [0] Reading the postinst, this seems to be when a certain file is=20
>> > missing. What ever happened to this file? And there are certainly=20
>> > better ways to deal with this than asking for a manual re-install...
>>=20
>> I don' think so. This is a neat trick, in fact. The reinstall costs yo=
u=20
>> nothing, since you already built the deb file.
>
>Not really. Remove/reinstall takes many minutes on my iBook 500 ---
>certainly not as long as the build, but it's not free. And unlike the
>build, it requires manual action.
>
>Some suggestions:
>
>    1) Add the file back. Depending on how it went missing, it
>       should still be in dpkg's database. Otherwise things like
>       dpkg-divert should make it possible.
>    2) Rename the package, give the new one Provides/Replaces/Conflicts
>       with the old one. Depend on the new one.
>
>Probably some other courses of action as well --- but I'd have to hear
>details before thinking of them.
>
>>=20
>> Don't underestimate the difficulty of upgrading a bunch of heavily=20
>> interdependent packages to a new version that has many new files and=20
>> files moved around to different places.
>
>I don't --- I've been around Debian long enough to appreciate the
>difficulty of making things work right.=20
>
>


Here's the problem:  In the old version of tetex-base, I used a PostRemov=
e
script in an attempt to clean some things up when you uninstall tetex,
but (with some hindsight) I didn't do it right:  it contains the line

  rm -Rf %p/share/texmf/tex/context

(At the time, the context package was being installed separately, but now=
 it
comes as part of tetex-texmf.)

What happens when you now upgrade tetex-base?  Well, first, due to the
dependency, it upgrades tetex-texmf to the latest version.  Then, it upgr=
ades
tetex-base, but in the course of doing so it executes that PostRemove scr=
ipt,
which wipes out files that were just installed.  My workaround is the "pl=
ease
reinstall tetex-texmf" message which you encountered.

The problem is that the removal of files is happening in PostRemove, outs=
ide
of dpkg's control.  But if you can think of an alternate way to solve thi=
s
problem, I would love to hear it.

  -- Dave