[maemo-developers] Optification of already installed packages

[From: Ville M. Vainio]

On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 6:31 PM, Jari Tenhunen <jari.tenhunen at iki.fi> wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 05, 2009 at 12:37:05PM +0300, Ville M. Vainio wrote:
>> Anyone done an optification script that does the move-to-opt + symlink
>> for already installed packages?
>>
>> Naive mind would think it's a trivial operation that should "just
>> work", any gotchas?
>
> Debian package management keeps track of which files are owned by which
> packages. If you just move the files, it will create havoc. You might be
> able to work around the problem with dpkg-divert or similar tricks.

IIUC debian package management (unlike rpm) is pretty lax about what
the files in fact are. Since there will still be symlinks in the
original places, package management may still be fooled to think
everything is the way it's supposed to be. Once you remove the
package, it will remove the symlinks and leave the "orphaned" files to
/opt.

This would probably be most realistic option to non-critical files
(huge -dbg packages, ...)

-- 
Ville M. Vainio
http://tinyurl.com/vainio