This one time, at band camp, Raphael Hertzog said: > severity 483997 wishlist > thanks > > On Sun, 01 Jun 2008, Stephen Gran wrote: > > Right now, if you have two packages that have a relationship with each > > other beyond a strict Dependency, there is no way to communicate that > > relationship to dpkg. I'm talking about things covered semantically > > by the Should-Start field of the LSB init scripts and things like that. > > There are several package sets in the archive where A does not Depend on > > B, but needs to have it's postinst run after B in certain circumstances. > > Are you only referring to the start order of services relying on each > other or do you have other use cases in mind?
I'm talking about ordering of maintainer scripts in an install run. Consider a program A that could use program B as a source of data, or could optionally run without it. Since it can run without it, we do not use a Depends to express the relationship. Since there is no Depends, dpkg will order the maintainer scripts of the two packages effectively randomly, sometimes allowing A to have postinst run before B has postinst run, breaking A. It feels to me like the problem is that Depends is overloaded to mean both "needs something from dependant package to run" and "must have maintainer scripts run after dependant package's maintainer scripts". I am fairly sure that assumption is made throughout the dpkg code base, so I'm not sure how easy it would be to change. Does that make it clearer? -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- | ,''`. Stephen Gran | | : :' : [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | `. `' Debian user, admin, and developer | | `- http://www.debian.org | -----------------------------------------------------------------
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