(debian-policy.info)Maintainer Scripts

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3.9 Maintainer Scripts
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The package installation scripts should avoid producing output which is
unnecessary for the user to see and should rely on ‘dpkg’ to stave off
boredom on the part of a user installing many packages.  This means,
amongst other things, not passing the ‘--verbose’ option to
‘update-alternatives’.

Errors which occur during the execution of an installation script must
be checked and the installation must not continue after an error.

Note that in general Note: Scripts. applies to package maintainer
scripts, too.

You should not use ‘dpkg-divert’ on a file belonging to another package
without consulting the maintainer of that package first.  When adding or
removing diversions, package maintainer scripts must provide the
‘--package’ flag to ‘dpkg-divert’ and must not use ‘--local’.

All packages which supply an instance of a common command name (or, in
general, filename) should generally use ‘update-alternatives’, so that
they may be installed together.  If ‘update-alternatives’ is not used,
then each package must use ‘Conflicts’ to ensure that other packages are
removed.  (In this case, it may be appropriate to specify a conflict
against earlier versions of something that previously did not use
‘update-alternatives’; this is an exception to the usual rule that
versioned conflicts should be avoided.)

Prompting in maintainer scripts