Re: use case for registering dynamic files for removal

Hi,

This has already been discussed since forever;
it is commonly called "volatile", "cruft" of "ghost" files,
the 'ghost' name comes from the rpm world.

Some are not actually file but glob patterns
that can match several files.

I don't know if there are plan to add the needed support it to dpkg soon -
if it was easy & evident it would had been a long time ago -
but a another way to have "automagic" support without waiting
for an expected change in dpkg is to use debhelper
or some debhelper add-on that rely on machine-readable
data that could be later on repurposed to be read by dpkg.

There is dh-cruft, that I maintain...
I can't really say I _wrote_ it because my perl is so bad.

I use it extensively at work to register the ownership
of each single file of the filesystem where we are severely
constrained (embedded systems)


I think debputy will be a better alternative in the long term
and it's python code and worth checking out.


Greetings

(other piece of the puzzle: lintian-brush and the
underlying tools which can be used
to automate some kind of mass transition
to a new packaging format)

Le dim. 3 sept. 2023 à 19:49, David Bremner <[email protected]> a écrit :
>
>
> >From an IRC discussion Helmut asked me to mention our use case for
> dynamic file registration. In emacs addon packages we currently generate
> byte-compiled .elc files and some symlinks at install time. It would be
> very useful not to have to track and clean those up in an ad-hoc way.
>