On Thu, 02 Feb 2012, Craig Sanders wrote:
> > The various sets of files are separated by an empty line, so you can
> > still map each file to the corresponding package.
>
> to paraphrase - the order of output of package file lists is not
> documented or guaranteed thus i should not rely on it.
>
> I did look at the dpkg -L output files, so it had occurred to me that
> doing what you suggest was an obvious possibility, but it also occurred
> to me that it was a stupid assumption to make. while it seems to be
> dpkg's behaviour right now, there's no guarantee that in some future
> optimisation the package list won't be sorted or stored in an internal
> hash of some kind (and thus become unordered).
It's not a stupid assumption... otherwise we would not have documented
the fact that you can query multiple packages at once.
The package names are stored in the argument list (argv[]) and this one
will not be reordered magically... there's no intermediate storage of any
kind (and there's no need for it).
Please trust the dpkg maintainers when it comes to dpkg's interface. I'm
ccing Guillem just in case he disagrees on this, but I doubt it. He's the
one who committed the earlier clarification already.
> so, in effect, you're telling me to switch from undocumented but clearly
> correct behaviour (libc6.list contains a list of libc6's files, not
> those of some other package) to undocumented and assumed behaviour.
It's not really undocumented:
-L, --listfiles package-name...
List files installed to your system from package-name. When multiple
pack‐
age-name are listed, the requested lists of files are separated by
an empty
line. However, note that files created by package-specific
installation-
scripts are not listed.
I fail to see how one could understand that dpkg would reorder the list of
packages it has been asked to process. But feel free to suggest a wording that
fixes your fears and I'll commit it so that you can feel confident in using it.
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer
Pre-order a copy of the Debian Administrator's Handbook and help
liberate it: http://debian-handbook.info/liberation/
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
