Bug#586328: Bug#153860: Bug#586328: gtk-doc-tools: Upgrade fails: ERROR: emacsen-common being used before being configured.

[Rob Browning]

Rob Browning <rlb at defaultvalue.org> writes:

> Just to be clear, as far as I know, this entire bug report is if
> anything a "wishlist" request.  While it's almost certainly possible to
> change/improve our emacs policy, the current policy requires any package
> that wants to use the debian emacs infrastructure to depend on either
> emacsen, or on a specific set of emacs flavors, but not emacsen-common.

After some investigation, I think we may be able to relax this policy
and just require add-on packages to depend on emacsen-common, which is
only ~150k, rather than some subset of flavors (which are all huge).

I don't know if that would satisfy your concerns, but it doesn't seem
too unreasonable to me, and I suspect it would eliminate the need for
many of the foo-el packages.  In any case, I'm planning to send an RFC
to the debian-emacsen list shortly.

> That said I'm beginning to wonder if there may actually be a different
> bug in the current system.  I believe the original intent of the
> dependency policy may have been to ensure that the various flavors of
> emacs are fully configured before any given add-on's scripts are called.
> If that's right, then imagine an add on package foo that contains
> something like this:
>
>   Depends: emacs23 | xemacs23
>
> Presumably foo might try to byte compile itself for both flavors in its
> emacsen-common install script, but I believe dpkg could be within its
> rights to only configure emacs23 before trying to configure foo.  Off
> the top of my head, I can't recall whether or not we considered that
> when drawing up the current policy.

Upon further consideration, it looks like this may be fine.  I think
that given the way that emacsen-common handles the installed-flavors
file, the add-on packages shouldn't hear about a flavor until/unless it
has finished its postinst call to emacs-install.

Though I suppose strictly speaking, we might want to add a bit to policy
that requires emacsen package maintainers to call emacs-install from a
point in their postinst where the package should be considered
completely ready to go.

Thanks
-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org and @debian.org
GPG as of 2002-11-03 14DD 432F AE39 534D B592 F9A0 25C8 D377 8C7E 73A4