[pacman-dev] [PATCH] Allow package to display a brief message before sync install

[Allan McRae]

Nagy Gabor wrote:
> 2009. 09. 15, kedd keltezéssel 21.18-kor James Rayner ezt írta:
>   
>> On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 9:14 PM, James Rayner <iphitus at iphitus.org> wrote:
>>     
>>> On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 11:20 AM, Dan McGee <dpmcgee at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>       
>>>> I don't really know what to think here. I had looked at that messages
>>>> one for a long time and thought it was a decent idea, but never went
>>>> far enough to take it and run with it.
>>>>
>>>> @Loui- sure, but this is for extraordinary messages- a lot more
>>>> exclusive than ChangeLog-worthy stuff, and you have to explicitly
>>>> request to see that anyway.
>>>>
>>>> @Jeff- it isn't exactly straightforward to view an install script
>>>> beforehand, and the post_install business is a rather hacky reason for
>>>> needing an install script.
>>>>
>>>> -Dan
>>>>
>>>>         
>>> Dan's got the idea...
>>>
>>> pacman should not break someone's system without at least telling them
>>> first. So yes - this is intended for more extraordinary messages.
>>>
>>> The current ways of informing the user (homepage/forum news and
>>> post-install) are broken and non-simple:
>>>  - both polling based
>>>       
>> oh, and post-install is after the fact - when the system is broken, so
>> it's not a very good way of informing the user that their system "will
>> break" because it's already broken.
>>
>> Anyway, I'm all for a more generalised/ideal setup, but that's been
>> wanted for a while with no patches coming forward.
>>
>>     
>
> OK. Here is my staindpont (not closely related to iphitus's patch, but
> some thoughts about the "problem"):
>
> 1. echo lines in install scriplets are stupid. I bet that you also
> looked into install scriplets in /var/lib/pacman/... many times manually
> to read that information on an installed package (when something went
> wrong). I think this requires a new %INFO% field in (local) database,
> which could be accessed by -Q. Drawback: pre_install, post_install,
> pre_upgrade etc. is more sophisticated. (It is possible to only print
> info if we upgrade version older than...)
> 2. I am not sure about the pre-transaction messages. We ask for user
> confirmation before downloading packages, so in order to print
> info/alarm etc. messages then, we _must_ store this info in sync
> database, or interrupt the transaction once more before actual install.
> post-transaction messages are easier to implement, see 1. Iphitus
> chooses putting %ALERT% to syncdb.
>
> Overall, I think iphitus's patch is a good compromise, if we want to
> distinguish important and non-important messages.
>
> My problem is that I don't see when the packager should remove %ALERT%
> from package, in 1.0-2, 1.1-2, 2.0-1? When I've read (and understood)
> the alert message, printing it again is just a spam.
>   

That point is what I have been thinking about all day but there is no 
easy solution there as far as I can tell.  I have the same issue with 
deciding when to remove provides lines...

Allan