The approach I have taken with 'installer' packages in the past is to try to make them behave as close as possible to 'real' packages.
That is, the data for the package is downloaded, verified and unpacked in the package's postinst. If the process fails, the postinst exits with a failure status. This causes dpkg to realise that the package installation failed (and from the user's point of view, it has--the files that the package contains aren't on the user's system). The user now knows to try to install the package again, and in fact this will occur automatically the next time they install something with apt. I definitely believe that 'silently' failing is absolutely the wrong thing to do in this situation. A lot of packages print unnecessary messages in their maintainer scripts; I can't be the only one who glances at the output, looks at my prompt (I have a green smiley face if the previous command exited successfully, and a red frownie if not) and then closes the terminal window. In this case the 'installation failed' message was lost in a sea of other messages. -- Sam Morris http://robots.org.uk/ PGP key id 1024D/5EA01078 3412 EA18 1277 354B 991B C869 B219 7FDB 5EA0 1078
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