Packages that should use "interest-noawait" trigger directive

[Raphael Hertzog]

[ Bccing the maintainers of packages quoted in this mail ]

Hi,

On Fri, 23 Sep 2011, Raphael Hertzog wrote:
> * There are some new trigger directives ("interest-noawait" and
>   "activate-noawait") that work like the existing directives except
>   that packages activating the triggers are not put in the
>   "triggers-awaited" status, they go straight to "installed" or
>   "triggers-pending". The difference is significant because packages
>   in "triggers-awaited" do not satisfy dependencies and can thus
>   force an early trigger processing that we'd like to avoid.
> 
>   If the trigger processing is not critical for the activating package
>   to actually work, then you should consider using these new
>   directives. If you do so, you will have to add a
>   “Pre-Depends: dpkg (>= 1.16.1)” to ensure the new dpkg is
>   installed even before your package is unpacked. If you're not
>   sure whether it's safe to add this Pre-Depends on your package,
>   please consult debian-devel at lists.debian.org for advice. See
>   deb-triggers(5) for details on this new feature.

Let's save some time and discuss immediately in which case it's worth
to add a Pre-Depends and to make use of this feature.

IMO the main criteria is the number of packages that are activating the
trigger. As such, packages like "man-db", "python-support", "menu",
"hicolor-icon-theme", "shared-mime-info", "gnome-menus",
"desktop-file-utils" are probably good candidates. Except for
shared-mime-info I already verified with the respective maintainers that
those are good candidates for this new directive, i.e. activating packages
can be considered configured straight away.

It's much less important for very specialised triggers like the lintian
one which detects when a new locale package is installed.

That said dpkg is traditionnaly one of the package that release notes
recommend to upgrade first (together with apt/aptitude) so in general
the supplementary Pre-Depends do not cause any complication in the
upgrade process. Thus I don't mind if packages with low-impact triggers
will want to switch to the new directive too. Others might have differing
opinion, we'll see. The few packages that should not use such a Pre-Depends
are the one that dpkg (transitively) pre-depends on.

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer

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