Hi!
On Fri, 2016-08-19 at 13:47:15 +0200, Philipp Hahn wrote:
> I accidentally called "dpkg-name" on some *.udeb files and they got
> renamed to .deb.
Yes, and the reasons are a bit ugly, so you might want to skip the
following paragraph…
This is the consequence of the half-assed integration of .udebs into
the lower-level deb toolchain. I started merging support into dpkg
years ago, but got into some technical disagreement with the
debian-installer team at the time (#452273), and while the discussion
got a bit heated, I think it had definitely not yet reached a point of
no-return, it then was referred to the tech-ctte by an uninvolved party
for no good reason (#575059), at which point I lost any kind of
motivation and before they imposed any kind of decree on any of
the "sides", I reverted the change and stopped any further work on
integrating udebs natively in dpkg. So that's what you are seeing above.
> Looking inside dpkg-name, it tries to evaluate "Package-Type" [1], but
> that is not contained in the control file of the binary package, so
> always evaluates to "deb":
> > 123 my $type = $fields->{'Package-Type'} || 'deb';
Right, “deb” is the default type so normal .deb packages will not have
that field, “udeb” is special cased in dpkg-genchanges to avoid including
that “huge” field, but any other value would get the field in the binary
package:
,--- dpkg-genchanges ---
my $pkg_type = $pkg->{'Package-Type'} ||
$pkg->get_custom_field('Package-Type') || 'deb';
if ($pkg_type eq 'udeb') {
delete $fields->{'Package-Type'};
delete $fields->{'Homepage'};
} else {
for my $f (qw(Subarchitecture Kernel-Version Installer-Menu-Item)) {
warning(g_('%s package with udeb specific field %s'), $pkg_type, $f)
if defined($fields->{$f});
}
}
`---
I also thought I had added support for Package-Type to dpkg-deb but it
seems not, I'll be doing so, but of course that will still not help
with .udebs, as per above.
> Is there some other (preferred) way to identify .udeb packages?
> 1. "Section: debian-installer"?
This is the current best "heuristic", but it still feels wrong, as the
true marker for whether a package is a deb or something else is the
Package-Type field.
Thanks,
Guillem
