Re: Unionfs etc Re: Packaging

[Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@xxxxxxxxx>]

Joerg Sonnenberger said on Mar 12, 2004 at 16:37:32:
> On Thu, Mar 11, 2004 at 08:51:11PM -0500, Rahul Siddharthan wrote:
> > Another question: the FreeBSD porters' handbook requires you to create
> > a directory tree first in your temporary install directory when
> > building pkg-plist, and add any newly created directories to pkg-plist
> > with a @dirrm -- is this really necessary?  It seems to me that we can
> > just make pkg_delete (or its successor) remove any empty directories
> > it finds after deleting files, including /usr/local/share or other
> > "standard" places -- there's no reason to have these directories if
> > there's nothing in them.
> 
> The only and correct solution is determing wether any other package uses
> such an directory. There is a reason for empty directories so exist, e.g.
> think of a chroot directory for a process not wanting any file IO. 

Should have made that clear: I was talking of cases where a directory
is non-empty before you remove the package, but after you remove all
files from that package, the directory becomes empty.  I wasn't
talking of removing all empty directories wantonly.  I can't think of
a case where a package needs an empty directory while another optional
package needs to put files into that directory -- if such cases exist,
I think they'd be sufficiently rare that we can use a .keep.this dummy
file inside the directory.  The current @dirrm setup just looks like a
big error-prone mess to me.

> Also
> the location for perl/python modules can be empty once installed and there
> is no need for ".KEEP_THIS" entries.

I don't quite see this.  Why do perl/python modules need to have empty
directories?  The only python module directories I have (in my home
area) were created by specific modules -- and the "base" directory was
created by the setup.py script for the first of those modules.  If I
remove all the modules, I should be able to remove $HOME/lib/python
with no ill effects.  The system lib/python directory of course will
never be empty unless you remove python totally.  I'm not familiar
with perl.

Rahul