Questions regarding PACKAGES remove

[Andreas Heinlein]

Hello,

I now have my first use of "PACKAGES remove" in the FAI configuration,
and I have come across two smaller problems:

1. The behaviour is not "idempotent", i.e. I get an error when the
packages to remove are already removed. This is the case quite often
since we use FAI also for softupdates, and I want to keep the "PACKAGES
remove" section for some time until I am sure that all clients have run
the softupdate at least once.

I get this in fai.log:

install_packages: executing chroot /target apt-get -y -o
Dpkg::Options::=--force-confdef -o Dpkg::Options::=--force-confnew
--purge remove xul-ext-adblock-plus
xul-ext-adblock-plus-element-hiding-helper xul-ext-noscript
Reading package lists...
Building dependency tree...
Reading state information...
E: Unable to locate package xul-ext-adblock-plus
E: Unable to locate package xul-ext-adblock-plus-element-hiding-helper
E: Unable to locate package xul-ext-noscript
ERROR: 25600 25600
ERROR: chroot /target apt-get -y -o Dpkg::Options::=--force-confdef -o
Dpkg::Options::=--force-confnew --purge remove xul-ext-adblock-plus
xul-ext-adblock-plus-element-hiding-helper xul-ext-noscript  return code 100

This doesn't seem to be much of a problem now, but I don't know what
happens if only one of the packages in question is already removed and
the others are not. More important is that it results in a non-empty
error.log and thus a seemingly unsuccessful installation in general.

2. fai-mirror complains that it doesn't know how to deal with "PACKAGES
remove". It doesn't include these packages either, so it is harmless but
may be easily correctable.

Bye,

Andreas