On Sat, Sep 25, 1999 at 03:00:35AM -0700, Joey Hess wrote: > 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.
Yeah, obviously /lib/libc.so.6 is a good example of this. If we were left with any period without it, there would obviously be problems. Ben