Proposal: Delayed installation of packages with install scripts

From: Carl Worth <cworth.a.t.east.isi.edu>
Date: Mon May 07 2001 - 07:48:59 EDT

Fellow Familiar developers,

I added a bit of code to ipkg this morning that could solve a couple
of problems. I was trying to decide what to do with the per-package
preinst/postinst scripts when installing packages into a sub-directory
offline, (ie. when using ipkg-make-familiar). Actually running the
scripts is problematic for several reasons:

        1) / is not the correct root directory.

        2) The host/target architectures may not match.

        3) Some installation script actions, (such as starting/stopping
           daemons), don't make sense offline.

For these reasons I changed the code so that when offline, it will not
install packages that have installation scripts, but instead store the
.ipk file into $IPKG_ROOT/usr/lib/ipkg/pending. Packages without
installation scripts will be installed as usual. Also, the "ipkg
install" and "ipkg install_pending" commands will check the pending
directory and prompt the user whether [s]he would like to install
those packages.

What do you think of this arrangement? The big impact is that an
initial installation of familiar will require a login/"ipkg
install_pending" step before being complete. The bootstrap process
already requires a call to ipkg, but this will be an extra step
required for the non-bootstrap install. Objections?

I see this as being beneficial in a few ways:

        o ssh can simply generate its host key via a postinst
          script. This is the most natural place to perform this
          step, and with this process there will be no confusion about
          a long delay because it will only happen when the user has a
          tty and will see a "generating ssh key, please wait"
          message.

        o any of the things currently being done in /root/postinst can
          now be moved into postinst scripts of appropriate packages,
          (which would let us then break even in terms of the number
          of installation steps required). This seems much more
          modular and maintainable to me.

Let me know what you think. The code is in CVS.

-Carl

-- 
Carl Worth                                        
USC Information Sciences Institute                 cworth@east.isi.edu
4350 N. Fairfax Dr. #770, Arlington VA 22203	          703-812-3725
Received on Mon May 7 04:50:06 2001

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