Re: [PATCH 2/7] shadow: add a -native recipe with customized utilities

[Phil Blundell <pb@pbcl.net>]

On Wed, 2011-06-01 at 16:05 -0500, Mark Hatle wrote:
> The reason I suggested the --root option was primarily for the ease of people
> who are NOT using the automated scripting, i.e. someone manually adding a
> preinst (or similar) to their recipes.

I was thinking about this stuff the other day for update-rc.d.  Really,
it sucks that all the manually-written postinsts have to include all of
this garbage about checking for $D.  It also sucks a bit that this same
code (for both manually-written and auto-generated postinsts) ends up
getting deployed into the packages and onto the target system, where it
is at best a waste of space.

I think maybe a better way of dealing with that whole thing would be for
update-rc.d-native and similar tools to provide a set of wrapper scripts
which would take care of all the machinations required to support
offline root mode, be that adding "--root $D" or doing stuff with chroot
or whatever.  If those were installed into some appropriate place in the
sysroot then we could arrange for the right directory to be prepended to
$PATH during rootfs construction and then everything ought to "just
work" without the postinst scripts needing to take any special measures.

p.