• use case for registering dynamic files for removal

    From David Bremner@21:1/5 to All on Sun Sep 3 19:50:02 2023
    XPost: linux.debian.maint.emacsen

    From an IRC discussion Helmut asked me to mention our use case for
    dynamic file registration. In emacs addon packages we currently generate byte-compiled .elc files and some symlinks at install time. It would be
    very useful not to have to track and clean those up in an ad-hoc way.

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  • From Alexandre Detiste@21:1/5 to All on Sun Sep 3 20:20:02 2023
    XPost: linux.debian.maint.emacsen

    Hi,

    This has already been discussed since forever;
    it is commonly called "volatile", "cruft" of "ghost" files,
    the 'ghost' name comes from the rpm world.

    Some are not actually file but glob patterns
    that can match several files.

    I don't know if there are plan to add the needed support it to dpkg soon -
    if it was easy & evident it would had been a long time ago -
    but a another way to have "automagic" support without waiting
    for an expected change in dpkg is to use debhelper
    or some debhelper add-on that rely on machine-readable
    data that could be later on repurposed to be read by dpkg.

    There is dh-cruft, that I maintain...
    I can't really say I _wrote_ it because my perl is so bad.

    I use it extensively at work to register the ownership
    of each single file of the filesystem where we are severely
    constrained (embedded systems)


    I think debputy will be a better alternative in the long term
    and it's python code and worth checking out.


    Greetings

    (other piece of the puzzle: lintian-brush and the
    underlying tools which can be used
    to automate some kind of mass transition
    to a new packaging format)

    Le dim. 3 sept. 2023 à 19:49, David Bremner <david@tethera.net> a écrit :


    From an IRC discussion Helmut asked me to mention our use case for
    dynamic file registration. In emacs addon packages we currently generate byte-compiled .elc files and some symlinks at install time. It would be
    very useful not to have to track and clean those up in an ad-hoc way.


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    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)