Re: software packaging and ReiserFS v4

[Mike Fedyk <mfedyk@matchmail.com>]

On Fri, Sep 05, 2003 at 10:18:06PM +0200, Ragnar Kj?rstad wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 05, 2003 at 12:44:13PM -0700, Mike Fedyk wrote:
> > On Fri, Sep 05, 2003 at 01:15:41PM -0500, Grant Miner wrote:
> > > If you are making a packaging system, I recommend you do not allow 
> > > scipts, since they open up a whole can of worms.  (They're impossible to 
> > > invert, introduce security problems, make additional work for GUI 
> > > package managers, and cause too many problems.)
> > 
> > What do you replace them with then?
> 
> I think if scripts were to be removed from the packaging system you
> would have to add a package-feature for every single thing that scripts
> are currently used for. 
> 
> If you look through a collection of packages I think you will find that
> they typically do things like:
> - create users
> - start / stop deamons
> and so on.
> 
> So the package-system would need a way to specify that a user is part of
> the package (that would be very easy with a /etc/passwd.d-system) and
> that deamons that are part of the package should be started at install
> and stopped at uninstall-time.
> 
> There are probably dozens of other examples of common operations - and
> you would not be able to remove the script-feature unless 99% of what
> they are used for is not needed anymore - so it's a complicated task.

Great, so now you have a scripting language in the installer.  What did you
just achieve?

If you want gui integration of the scripts, just make nice wrappers of the
standard unix utilities that create a window saying "creating user x", or
prompting the user for data, or printing a notice.

You could probably even take the ncurses library, and add the wrappers there.

But let the people who want to do this choose the best way...