Re: usbutils 0.81 release

From: Kay Sievers
Date: Wed Apr 29 2009 - 15:55:48 EST


On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 21:50, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh
<hmh@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Apr 2009, Kay Sievers wrote:
>> > Debian places it in /var/lib/usbids/ for a good reason. ÂSo does Ubuntu.
>> > Both have working "update-usbids" scripts (might be the one from upstream,
>> > or something different). ÂThey also have the original file in /usr/share, I
>> > don't know if usbutils was changed to check /var first then /usr, or what.
>>
>> Having several files on the same system sounds crazy from a distro
>> standpoint. There needs to be only a single database by default. Users
>
> We are talking about two files, here. ÂNot several.
>
>> can do whatever they want anyway, but packages should not support such
>> a thing.
>
> If they are to be useful, yes, they do. ÂOr do you want us to package just
> the usb-ids text file by itself and keep updating it all the time? ÂThat's
> the only other possibility, and it is done for the tzdata.
>
> But update-usbids (like update-pciids and update-intel-microcode) works just
> fine, so likely the usbutils maintainer didn't have any reasons to move from
> update-usbids to a volatile package.
>
>> If the user updates it, what does a new ids file do? Overwrite it
>
> Well, the package overwrites the older one if the download suceeds with a
> mv. ÂNo mess. ÂIf the download fails, the temp file is removed, and the
> older one remains untouched.
>
> There is no mess here. ÂAnd it might be a simple case of the package
> creating /var/lib/usbids/usb.ids at post-install time from the static
> packaged data, and usbutils always using just /var/lib/usbids/usb.ids. I am
> not the maintainer of that package, and sincerely, given your tone, I am not
> inclined to go fetch the source and read the scripts.
>
> Now, I am not sure there is any checking against partial downloads. ÂThat is
> one thing a more controlled volatile package would be better at.

And if your distro updates the package, it overwrites the changes you
did to the file, and they are lost?

Kay
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