Re: My thoughts on package-delete (was Re: Fighting with packages!)
Stephen J Turnbull <turnbull(a)sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> writes:
How about _before_ the installation? I have in mind conflicts among
files in etc/, especially in cases where for some reason the package
contents change by addition or deletion of libraries.
There are no conflicts at present. The one potential place where we
have a conflict is in the sounds-au and sounds-wav packages. I
rejected a patch that would have made a conflict in the README files.
This could also affect files in subdirectories of lisp/, although we
can catch that via shadow detection.
There should be no conflicts by definition in lisp/. If there is a
conflict, then it is a package upgrade and it will be handled by the
mechanism I described. It is an unwritten golden rule that packages
only touch one lisp directory.
sb> We could save either the list of files or a machine-generated
sb> deletion shell script. The former would be more flexible.
Deletion is rare.
No, it won't be. Deletion will be the *most* common thing done in
21.0. I strongly suspect nearly everyone will attempt loading the
SUMO/相撲 tarball first and then want to delete the stuff they don't
want -- just as always has been the case.
Let's have flexibility; either way the machine can generate the
script at little cost.
Agreed about having flexibility.
sb> This won't completely work for de-installation because we need
sb> things to work somewhat even if the MANIFEST files get
sb> misplaced[1].
sb> Footnotes:
sb> [1] Do we really?
If not, we should forget about running source packages in-place, I
think.
That's officially unsupported anyway. You're on your own and if
things break you get to keep both pieces.