Hi,
Do the GuideLines/Does the FPC have an opinion on rpms intentionally printing out textual messages during installs?
At least, I could not find a corresponding paragraph in the GuideLines.
Background: tripwire's spec (Currently under review) contains this:
%post ... # Print getting started help message if [ $1 -eq 1 ]; then echo To configure tripwire, read: %_docdir/%{name}-%{version}/README.Fedora fi
I don't have a strong opinion on this and actually am ambivalent.
On one hand, such messages can be helpful to users.
On the other hand, in general, rpm-installs should be silent as much as possible.
Furthermore, I am not sure if printing such messages is safe. How does rpm handle such messages/ to which file descriptor will they be piped (stdout, stderr ...)? Will they desturb installers (yum, apt, shell scripts, pirut, yumex, synaptic, ...) and what happens with such messages during unsupervised installs?
Ralf
[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=203864
On Thursday, 21 December 2006 at 09:06, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
Hi,
Do the GuideLines/Does the FPC have an opinion on rpms intentionally printing out textual messages during installs?
At least, I could not find a corresponding paragraph in the GuideLines.
Background: tripwire's spec (Currently under review) contains this:
%post ... # Print getting started help message if [ $1 -eq 1 ]; then echo To configure tripwire, read: %_docdir/%{name}-%{version}/README.Fedora fi
I don't have a strong opinion on this and actually am ambivalent.
On one hand, such messages can be helpful to users.
On the other hand, in general, rpm-installs should be silent as much as possible.
Personally I'm against any install-time messages from rpm. If there are any, they should indicate a warning or an error. I was going to ask the submitter to remove this.
Regards, R.
On Thu, Dec 21, 2006 at 12:02:32PM +0100, Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:
On Thursday, 21 December 2006 at 09:06, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
Hi,
Do the GuideLines/Does the FPC have an opinion on rpms intentionally printing out textual messages during installs?
At least, I could not find a corresponding paragraph in the GuideLines.
Background: tripwire's spec (Currently under review) contains this:
%post ... # Print getting started help message if [ $1 -eq 1 ]; then echo To configure tripwire, read: %_docdir/%{name}-%{version}/README.Fedora fi
I don't have a strong opinion on this and actually am ambivalent.
On one hand, such messages can be helpful to users.
The same is true of about every daemon in Fedora, e.g. installing a server would spill your screen with several dozens of hints of you needing to configure web, nfs, ftp etc. services. :)
The nose would drown real errors from the rpm transaction.
On the other hand, in general, rpm-installs should be silent as much as possible.
Personally I'm against any install-time messages from rpm. If there are any, they should indicate a warning or an error. I was going to ask the submitter to remove this.
I agree with Rathann: rpm output has been assumed to be silent if everything is all right since its very beginning. Perhaps it's even documented in maximum rpm or rpm's source code.
Anyway a strong -1 to allowing any non-error/warning output.
On 21.12.2006 09:06, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
Do the GuideLines/Does the FPC have an opinion on rpms intentionally printing out textual messages during installs? At least, I could not find a corresponding paragraph in the GuideLines.
Hmm, I think we discussed this some weeks/months ago and I think the consensus was that "RPM files should not output anything during (un)install". But I can't find it in the guidelines just yet -- maybe was forgotten again... (or I'm to blind to find it)
I don't have a strong opinion on this and actually am ambivalent. On one hand, such messages can be helpful to users. On the other hand, in general, rpm-installs should be silent as much as possible.
/me strongly votes for silent. Yes, having "something" that sends notes like the one from tripwire to the sysadmin somehow would be helpfull. But %pre{,un},%post{,un} are the wrong place for it IMHO as it often scrolls away quickly unnoticed and is not even shown in pirut and other tools afaik.
CU thö
Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
On 21.12.2006 09:06, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
Do the GuideLines/Does the FPC have an opinion on rpms intentionally printing out textual messages during installs? At least, I could not find a corresponding paragraph in the GuideLines.
Hmm, I think we discussed this some weeks/months ago and I think the consensus was that "RPM files should not output anything during (un)install". But I can't find it in the guidelines just yet -- maybe was forgotten again... (or I'm to blind to find it)
I don't have a strong opinion on this and actually am ambivalent. On one hand, such messages can be helpful to users. On the other hand, in general, rpm-installs should be silent as much as possible.
/me strongly votes for silent. Yes, having "something" that sends notes like the one from tripwire to the sysadmin somehow would be helpfull. But %pre{,un},%post{,un} are the wrong place for it IMHO as it often scrolls away quickly unnoticed and is not even shown in pirut and other tools afaik.
They also mess up automatic installation/upgrading systems output unnecessarily. +1 for only warnings and/or errors.
Not however that people will try and fix this by redirecting the whole output to /dev/null , so not even errors or warnings will show up ;-) Perhaps a footnote that that is not the preferred way of fixing it.
Regards, Fernando
packaging@lists.fedoraproject.org
-
Axel Thimm -
Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski -
Fernando Nasser -
Ralf Corsepius -
Thorsten Leemhuis