On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 09:26:38PM +0200, Christoph Anton Mitterer wrote: > 2) Package installation already downloads something and > installs this e.g. some font packages (msttcorefonts) or > documentations (susv2/3) do this.
Personally I dislike this mode of operation. I don't like lots of code running in postinsts as root to perform e.g. downloads (examples: flashplugin-nonfree) and subsequent processing (unpacking, running shell scripts, etc.). In addition you don't get the size of the downloaded blobs as part of your package's Install-Size and in many cases in the past its been possible to have the package marked as installed correctly despite it not actually working. In the case of flashplugin-nonfree I frequently hit a problem where it would invoke wget which would wait for a long time for network timeouts, stalling the upgrade process, due to a non-defined http_proxy environment variable in my session's context. I tried to solve this problem for game data at least using "game-data-packager", which is designed after "java-package", which was (at the time I looked) the only tool which I thought approached the problem in a sane way. -- Jon Dowland
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