Heads-up: postinstall scripts and PATH (Attn all package maintainers)

[Harold L Hunt II]

Igor Pechtchanski wrote:
> XFree86-f*.sh: umount, cygpath, mount
> 	Note: the above script should also check that the directory is
> 	already mounted in the correct mode instead of unmounting and
> 	remounting it all the time.

The reason we force an unmount is that the mount point may, in fact, by 
pointing to a non-existant path.  That means that setup.exe will extract 
our package files to /dev/null on an attempt at a first install with an 
invalid font mount point.  However, most users will then attempt a 
second install; without the forced unmount/remount, the same problem 
would recur.  The forced unmount/remount causes the second and 
subsequent installation attempts to succeed.

I would love to solve this problem properly but "pre-install" scripts 
would be a real challenge for setup.exe, unless there was a concise set 
of rules about what packages could and could not have pre-install 
scripts, lest we end up with chicken before egg problems for some packages.

> XFree86-lib.sh: mkdir, test?, tar, rm, ln
> XFree86-prog.sh: touch, ln
> XFree86-xserv.sh: ln
> fontconfig.sh: dirname, basename, diff, cp, mkdir
> 	Note: this one also uses bash syntax.  Moreover, it requires things
> 	like "diff" and "dirname"/"basename" to run, but neither "diffutils"
> 	nor "sh-utils" are in the "requires" clause of "fontconfig".
> freetype2.sh: mkdir, ln

I agree that I should probably hand-craft the PATH for all of the above 
scripts (including the XFree86-f*.sh scripts).

> xfig.sh: mkdir, tar, rm, ln
> 	Note: "tar" should be "require"d.

Ditto.  Interesting not about tar not being a required package.  I never 
realized that that script used tar.  In fact, I don't remember writing 
it, so somebody else must have written it... clever script :)

Harold