binary control files

[mlhartme]

I need to add binary control files to a package (actually a jar file, that I use in my maintainer scripts).

Can you please consider to merge something like this?

Best regards

Michael

[tcurdt]

Why did you remove this?

[mlhartme]

Just to make the tests work in my environment. Quick hack for me, Do not merge this, sorry.

[mlhartme]

But probably hard to implement. I think you detect variables withing string - and have to encode them for saving the resulting file.

Another approach would be a configurable method you call before closing the tar file. I'd add my binary file in this method. And make my method availabe to your Code by adding a dependency to the Plugin config in my pom.

[tcurdt]

Hey Michael,
thanks for the contribution. Can you elaborate a bit on this?
Frankly speaking I am not even sure what "binary control files" are.
Is this just to ship the jar so you can call it from your maintainer scripts?

[mlhartme]

Yes, it want to ship a jar file that I can access from my maintainer script.
Because I'm sick of writing shell scripts - I want to have one generic maintainer shell script that just dispatches into Java.

The only way (I found ...) to do this is to append the jar file to the postrm script.

You can see this in action here: https://github.com/mlhartme/stool/blob/master/setup/pom.xml

[tcurdt]

Frankly speaking I am not such a fan of adding some new rule about the file name. Maybe we should just make this work with https://github.com/mlhartme/jdeb/blob/binanry_control/src/main/java/org/vafer/jdeb/ControlBuilder.java#L120 instead.

[mlhartme]

Agreed. I though about that too, but i didn't see a reliable way to detect binary files. In my case, the file is a shell script with a jar file appended.

[tcurdt]

I guess the proper way to fix this is expanding https://github.com/tcurdt/jdeb/blob/master/src/main/java/org/vafer/jdeb/utils/InformationInputStream.java

Right now we are only checking for the BOM and the shebang. We could also also try to detect a binary there.

[mlhartme]

How can you properly check for a binary there? Character codes >= 128?

And by the way: what about shell scripts with "here documents" http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V3_chap02.html#tag_18_07_04. Maybe they have a similar problem.

[tcurdt]

If we don't use BOM and Shebang but plain heuristics we indeed run into those problems with "here documents", too.

I am wondering if we should take a step back here. Right now we have 2 types

• shell - where we apply variable expansion
• other - which we just copy without applying variable expansion

Introducing a 3rd type is a bit sneaky as we would want to have variable expansion on only the shell part of the combined file.

So question is whether there is another way to ship the jar but appending it to the shell script or having some kind of convention/marker that tells jdeb where to apply the variable expansion and what to copy as binary.

[mlhartme]

I'm not aware of an alternative place for the jar: is has to be present when postrm is executed. And at this point dpkg has removed all other files of the package. Even e.g. prerm.

Is there a way to define a variables with my binary content?

[tcurdt]

Not binary variables yet - but that's actually a very (!) interesting line of thinking to solve this.