Arch Linux

Summary and Info:

In the alpm-hooks(5) man page, the description of "Target", says:

Shell-style glob patterns are allowed.

This should be clarified, since the wildcards can match any characters in the file path, including '/'. This means that

Target = usr/include/*.h

matches all the .h files beneath /usr/include, not just the ones at the top level.

This is (probably) what one wants, but it differs from the usual use of glob. It is like
find /usr/include -name '*.h'
as opposed to
ls /usr/include/*.h

The alpm-hooks man page should probably refer to fnmatch(3), and explain that that that fnmatch will be called without the FNM_PATHNAME or FNM_PERIOD (or any other) flags.

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Additional discussion:

I discovered this while trying to write something to list all of the hooks that *would* be run if a given package were installed (or upgraded, or removed). As far as I can tell, this can't be done with any of the standard tools. (Am I missing something?) The targets in xorg-mkfontdir.hook confused me:

Target = usr/share/fonts/*/
Target = !usr/share/fonts/encodings/*

If these were "normal" globs, the second line would have no effect--a file in fonts/encodings/ can't be a sub-directory of fonts/. But this actually matches all directories underneath fonts/ *except* encodings/ or any of its sub-directories. IMHO, it would be simpler if the Targets were just regular expressions, but I'm sure that it's way too late in the game to consider that.

As far as finding all of a package's hooks, it might be nice if pacman (and the alpm library) had a full-fledged --dry-run option, along the lines of "make -n", instead of just --print.

The motivation for this is that a large update (involving about 170 packages) failed part-way thru, so the post-transaction hooks for the packages that were installed before the transaction got interrupted didn't get run.