NOTICE for all package maintainers with faulty post-install scripts

[Christopher Faylor]

On Thu, Aug 12, 2010 at 09:56:49AM -0400, Andrew Schulman wrote:
>> Thanks to Jon Turney's recent patch we've discovered that many
>> post-install packages were previously failing silently. 
>
>Failing silently... so what is the preferred protocol in case a
>post-install script fails?  Emit a message to stderr, which will be caught
>and shown to the user?

There is apparently a disconnect here.  setup.exe now lets you know if a
script fails.  Scripts are not supposed to fail.  Some scripts are
routinely failing and should be fixed.

If your script fails for a valid reason then of course exiting with a
non-zero status is the way to go.  That is what the new dialog box was
intended to catch.

If one of your scripts does fail then you should work out why with the
affected user and take steps to make sure that it doesn't fail.

cgf