Hi!

This package contains the «cscli» program, which directly accesses
the dpkg internal database, which seems gratuitous.

The postinst is overloaded to act as some kind of helper that is then
called by Go code, or directly by the user (as prompted by the README).
Neither of the two functions involved share any other code with the rest
of the maintscript, and as it is this is not upstreamable. These should
be split into an external helper that gets called by both the maintscript
and the Go code. Or integrated directly in the Go CLI tool (but that
would be a bit more work).


This is a problem for several reasons, because even though the layout and
format of the dpkg database is administrator friendly, and it is expected
that those might need to mess with it, in case of emergency, this
“interface” does not extend to other programs besides the dpkg suite of
tools. The admindir can also be configured differently at dpkg build or
run-time. And finally, the contents and its format, might change in
the future.

Thanks,
Guillem

Hi Guillem,

Here's some context for that.

Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org> (2021-06-23):

I'm in touch with upstream, and various things should get improved in
their next major release regarding “configuration management” in a broad
sense (including the way assets are handled). The initial packaging was
an opportunity to discover a number of constraints/needs that weren't
necessarily clear or expressed in the first place (a shell wizard did
the job for source-based deployment).

We tried to get something in shape before the bullseye freeze, and it
seemed we could speed things up a little by (ab)using the postinst in
this way; we expect to perform some heavy clean-up during the bookworm
release cycle, replacing a lot of (if not all of) Debian-specific code
with upstream things that are being developed, partly based on the
feedback gathered during initial packaging.


Cheers,

Cyril Brulebois <cyril@debamax.com> (2021-06-23):

This didn't happen in the 1.4.x series, and last I heard about it (a few
weeks back), the plan was for 1.5.x to start featuring some assistant;
but that's definitely post-bookworm.

There were too many things to handle already, I haven't even tried to
rework the internal dpkg database part…


Cheers,