[pacman-dev] package file hooks

[Allan McRae]

Xavier wrote:
> I was recently considering to implement package file hooks.
> <snip>
>
> But today I felt on this :
> http://www.linux.com/feature/144666
> And this looks great, this feature might not even need to be
> implemented in pacman.
> But well, I don't know how well it would work in practice. It is just
> an idea to discuss about

This is actually quite awesome...   Just adding this command to the 
incron table:

/usr/share/info IN_CLOSE_WRITE /home/allan/hook/infoadd.sh $@/$#

calls my infoadd "hook" script:

#!/bin/bash
install-info $1 /usr/share/info/dir

and any time I install a package with info pages they get added to the 
info index!  Of course you would also need to add remove "hooks" too.

However, the BIG, BIG downside of this is that packages that want to use 
these hooks would require the user is running the incron daemon which I 
am very much against.  For this reason, I think it would be much better 
to implement this in pacman.  Also, consider e.g. adding fonts.  You 
don't want to update the font cache once per install and not for every 
file added. 

So I think a more general hooks mechanism in pacman is the way to go here.

Allan