Fwd: [Bug 4145] New: ipkg: package installed/configured BEFORE its dependencies

[Alexandros Kostopoulos]

Hi all,

I was about to make a post regarding the exact same thing. Well, according  
to the debian policy about Depends:
'This declares an absolute dependency. A package will not be configured  
unless all of the packages listed in its Depends field have been correctly  
configured.'

So, I think that indeed this is not correct behaviour on behalf of i/opkg.  
Instead, it should do some kind of topological sorting of the
packages before starting configuring them.

Pre-depends is even worse (although I think that ipkg states clearly that  
it doesn't support this):

'This field is like Depends, except that it also forces dpkg to complete  
installation of the packages named before even starting the installation  
of the package which declares the pre-dependency, as follows:

When a package declaring a pre-dependency is about to be unpacked the  
pre-dependency can be satisfied if the depended-on package is either fully  
configured, or even if the depended-on package(s) are only unpacked or  
half-configured, provided that they have been configured correctly at some  
point in the past (and not removed or partially removed since). In this  
case, both the previously-configured and currently unpacked or  
half-configured versions must satisfy any version clause in the  
Pre-Depends field.'

So, unless I'm missing something here, this doesn't work that well in  
opkg. Of course, I understand that, in practice, this isn't always a  
problem, since most postinst scripts just need the right binaries and libs  
to be in place in order to run; a unconfigured dependency isn't always  
going to break things up. Then of course, there are cases like the one  
Marcin reports.

I don't know how easy it is to fix this, since I'm new to opkg. But it  
sure would be a plus if we could fix it.

thank you

Alex