[pacman-dev] Potential bug in alpm-hooks; fix provided

[Stefan Klinger]

Hi,

I'm providing a fix [1] for the following issue.

I've noticed that exactly one `Exec` directive is allowed in
alpm-hooks(5).  This is not explicitly stated in the manual (the word
"required" does not usually imply "non-repeatable", as seems to be
intended by the manual), nor does it rise an error.  Instead, multiple
occurrences are silently ignored.

Use case:

    # When installed as a pacman hook [1], this will call the
    # `my-update-pacman-mirrorlist` script every time the file
    # `/etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist` should be updated.

    [Trigger]
    Operation = Upgrade
    Operation = Install
    Type = File
    Target = etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

    [Action]
    When = PostTransaction
    Exec = /usr/bin/my-update-pacman-mirrorlist
    Exec = /usr/bin/rm -f /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist.pacnew

Only the last `Exec` is used.  I think it is semantically correct
since the syntax looks like an assignment that overwrites the previous
one.  But it is inconsistent with the use of `Operation` in the
`Trigger` section.  I would expect the commands to be evaluated in
order, or to see an error due to reusing `Exec`.

I think raising an error would be best, otherwise pacman would have to
provide means to decide how to handle individually failing commands, a
situation that is more flexibly handled by an external script, which
should be called instead of using multiple `Exec`s.

I have implemented this in [1] and added a test.  If you like that, I
would update the documentation, and also look for other values that
are silently overwritten when parsing a hook.  Also, I'd like to make
`Operation` accept things like

    Operation = Upgrade Install

and in future versions deprecate the current use of multiple
assignments which I consider rather unfortunate.

Cheers,
Stefan

____________________
[1] https://github.com/s5k6/pacman/tree/fix-hook-exec


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