3 ms·

When I first learned how Debian (and other) packages were put together I was somewhat surprised. Not just by the security implications but also by the inherent

When I first learned how Debian (and other) packages were put together I was somewhat surprised. Not just by the security implications but also by the inherent complexity. Even if you’re using templates and generators you can gain a lot by moving all of that out of the package and into the package manager/installer. Distribution-level changes, user OS customization and possibly even reduced privileges would become easier to handle. On the package manager side it seems like maintainability would (in the general case) vastly increase.

bluGill 8y ago
There is a downside though: if you forget something in the declarative tool it cannot be done. Using bash scripts lets a good programmer get what they need done. Using declarative makes it easier to do everything we thought of but some things are accidentally impossible. I think an escape to bash might always be required, but I think it should be a restrictive thing. That is packages with that flag require a special flag passed to dpkg. Also any packages using bash should automatically get extra reviewers.