Package Management

[Randy McMurchy]

Hi all,

Though this topic may be borderline off-topic for the -dev lists, they
have the most traffic, and just may be relevant.

My question is this:

How do others handle the situation where directories are created by
a package during the package install, and then other packages install
other files in these directories?

Take for example, GLib. During my installations, Glib is one of the
first packages I install (in fact do it during the chroot phase of LFS).
Anyway, for example GLib will create a /usr/share/gtk-doc directory
and the corresponding html directory and then populate it.

Later on other packages will populate /usr/share/gtk-doc/html with
other files/directories. Now, a bit later, I may want to update GLib
to a more recent version. The first thing I do is use my log of installed
files and directories during the initial Glib installation to remove
anything it had installed.

I don't like overwriting files, I prefer to remove all old files from
the previous version before commencing an installation of a newer version.

But I can't remove the /usr/share/gtk-doc directory as other packages
have also used it since.

After removing all the GLib files, I will usually remove all the log
files associated with that initial installation. And this leaves me with
the dilemma that there is now no package that shows it created the
/usr/share/gtk-doc directory.

This is not harmful, but from a logging standpoint it has a deficiency
in that I can't determine what package initially installed the directory.

I realize I could keep my old logs from packages I've since removed and
replaced, but I'm wondering how others do it.

-- 
Randy

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