[Dict-common-dev] Re: Deadline for ispell dictionaries and wordlists transition to new policy

[Agustín Martín Domingo]

Tollef Fog Heen wrote:
> * Agustín Martín Domingo 
> 
> (please Cc me on replies, I'm not subscribed)
> 
> | In the meantime, please test the system as much as you can. There
> | are surely some hidden bugs, and we will find some more after the
> | transition starts, but the most we find before the better. Remember
> | that we have at the sourceforge staging area packages for nearly
> | all old style ispell dictionary and wordlist packages (there is
> | some very new one that might not be there).
> 
> Why Pre-Depends?  At least for the norwegian packages, they don't have
> a preinst, which means that Pre-Depends work just like Depends.
> 

Thanks for pointing out that. As a matter of fact the policy says 
nothing about modifying preinst scripts, so that should be valid for all 
IDWP. I am afraid that pre-dependency was left there from the first 
stages of policy reimplementation, when we wanted to run some 
dictionaries-common scripts from packages debconf config files ... until 
we realized that debconf did run them before the package was even unpacked.

There are also some things with the templates. Currently the only real 
pre-dependency is through debconf templates provided by 
dictionaries-common, but that is probably not a real pre-dependency, 
since if I am not wrong, debconf

1) Gathers the templates from all packages to be installed and puts
    them in his database. Here the ordering is not important.

2) Run the config files, so all templates are already installed at this
    time.

Then the real installation process starts. Here comes other of the 
reasons why we left the Pre-Depends, and that can also be wrong, make 
sure that dictionaries-common is fully configured before any ispell 
dictionary or wordlist package. But testing with dpkg and wspanish and 
wfrench packages modified to use only depends,

dpkg -i dictionaries-common_0.7.1_all.deb \
	wenglish_2.0-2.2_all.deb.depends-only \
	wspanish_1.0.11.6_all.deb.depends-only

installs the packages in different order that

dpkg -i wenglish_2.0-2.2_all.deb.depends-only
	wspanish_1.0.11.6_all.deb.depends-only \
	dictionaries-common_0.7.1_all.deb

as expected. For this later case, the unpacking order is

   Desempaquetando el reemplazo de wenglish ...
   Desempaquetando el reemplazo de wspanish ...
   Desempaquetando el reemplazo de dictionaries-common ...

but does configuration in the right order, although these wenglish and 
wspanish only depend on dictionaries-common (no pre-depend here)

   Configurando dictionaries-common (0.7.1) ...
   Configurando wenglish (2.0-2.2) ...
   Configurando wspanish (1.0.11.6) ...

I do not think there will be any scenario worse than standalone dpkg, 
and even in it seems that a simple depends is enough so no package 
depending on other is configured before the one depended on. So seems 
that we can safely change the Pre-Depends to a Depends. But may be I am 
missing something.

Furthermore, reading the policy document it even refers to the config 
reason, what is clearly false.

Rafael, Do you remember any other reason we considered for this? What do 
you think?

Cheers,

Agustin

-- 
=====================================================================
Agustin Martin Domingo, Dpto. de Fisica, ETS Arquitectura Madrid,
(U. Politecnica de Madrid)  tel: +34 91-336-6536, Fax: +34 91-336-6554,
email:agmartin@aq.upm.es, http://corbu.aq.upm.es/~agmartin/welcome.html