[Piuparts-devel] [xml/sgml-pkgs] Bug#611418: dh_installcatalogs /etc/sgml management

[Dave Steele]

On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 9:28 AM, Andreas Beckmann <debian at abeckmann.de> wrote:
> This is actually a bug in dpkg, see the summary I posted in
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=316521#143
>
> IMHO it should be fixed there instead of working around it in other tools.
>

I agree with your analysis. This would likely not be a problem if
apt/dpkg respected dependency relationships in purge.

But I have a concern about the proposed solution. It feels like magic.
Are we sure that this won't have unintended consequences elsewhere?

My preference would be to have one package take ownership of an
optional directory, and make it responsible for managing that
directory. These patches work towards that.

That's how xml-core treats /etc/xml, btw. It doesn't work just because
it doesn't get called last for purge.

There's nothing in /etc/xml and /etc/sgml at compile time. Those
packages do not need to own those directories.